International Scholarly Research Network ISRN Emergency Medicine Volume 2012, Article ID 340273, 4 pages doi:10.5402/2012/340273 Research Article Racial Disparities in Healthcare: Are We Prepared for the Future? Brief Report on Emergency Medical Services in a County Health Department in California Ken Russell Coelho 1 and Virginia T. Nguyen 2 1 Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 2 School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Virginia T. Nguyen, vtbnguyen@mednet.ucla.edu Received 21 August 2012; Accepted 6 September 2012 Academic Editors: C. C. Chang, W. Kloeck, A. Pazin-Filho, and M. Pocar Copyright © 2012 K. R. Coelho and V. T. Nguyen. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Demographic trends indicate that ethnic minority populations constitute 25 percent of the current population and will be the majority of the United States population in 2050. Forty percent of the demographic in California are ethnic minorities making encounters between healthcare workers and patients from different cultural backgrounds commonplace. Research also indicates that ethnic minority patients are more likely to utilize emergency medical services as an entry point into the health system due to lack of medical insurance and access to primary care. Our qualitative study attempts to understand health disparities through focus groups with 76 patients and their feedback on the use of emergency medical services. Patients revealed challenges in both service provision and delivery of emergency medical services. Implications include the development of cultural competence training programs and the selection of diverse groups of county emergency medical first responders in California. 1. Introduction Ethnic minority groups are moving towards being a majority of the population in the United States. Recent demographic trends indicate that ethnic minorities constitute 25 percent of the current population and in fact will be the majority of the US population in 2050 [1]. Particularly, 40.5 percent of California’s population embodies people of nonwhite descent and 12.4 million of the state’s 31.4 million people speak a language other than English as their primary language [1]. As a result, encounters between healthcare workers and patients from different cultural backgrounds are rapidly becoming commonplace. Although US ethnic minority demographics are chang- ing, disparities in the healthcare system still exist. Firstly, research reveals that a large majority of American physicians lack the information to understand how culture influences the clinical encounter and the skills to effectively bridge potential differences in communication [2]. Secondly, ethnic minority Americans represent the unemployed, the under- educated, the poor, and those from lower socioeconomic status groups which have been correlated with poor access to health care services and disproportionate health outcomes [3–5]. Thirdly, empirical findings document that ethnic minority patients receive substandard healthcare services even when income and insurance are the same as their white counterparts [6]. Furthermore, linguistic and cultural barriers, stereotyping, biases and uncertainty exhibited by healthcare providers within the clinical encounter com- pounded by time pressure adversely effect access to care [7]. In an effort to address disparities, the US healthcare system has improved efforts to enhance physician cultural competence; cultural competence modules have been incor- porated into physician training programs and medical stu- dent curriculum. However, evidence suggests that ethnic minority patients are more likely to utilize emergency med- ical services in the first instance, hence first entry point into the healthcare system for reasons. Firstly, such patients are more likely to not have access to health insurance coverage and secondly are more likely to access emergency medical services due to ease of accessibility and common knowledge on the use of 9-1-1 emergency medical services [8–10].