Table 5 Main themes and illustrative quotes reflecting Latino-serving providers’ perspectives on adequacy of SAVAME services for Latino immigrants in Philadelphia, 2019–2020 (N = 30)

 Limited cultural competency and tailored trauma-informed services

“A lot of organizations are not culturally competent to serve Latinos […] at this point we have such a large Latino population that it should be everyone's main focus to have, kind of like, to make it a point to-to know how to serve Latinos. […] I think having bicultural providers and having people just be aware of the issues that people are facing outside of their health and outside of HIV and how that could affect them, like [as a] whole person and how [these] can make it difficult for them to address these different issues.” (KII #13)

 Shortage of ethnically concordant providers

“…or no one there, like they don't have… what’s a [politically correct] way to say this? They don't have like a staff that looks like the population that they're serving you know, which makes it really hard for people to connect with them even if they do speak Spanish.” (KII #13)

 Need for translation services reduces quality of provider/client encounter

“It's not fair to people that someone else that is not a medical provider is in the room with them translating back and forth between them […] and in those interactions there's a lot of things lost. Especially because I know most people will use like the phone line which I've seen in action and it is terrible. It's like it just doesn't work and it's just awkward.” (KII #13)

 Low-capacity organizations face challenges to hire, train, retain staff necessary to increase quality or expand services

“Within Latinx-specific organizations, I think that [services are] adequate only if they have enough people on staff to help. That's the main thing. […] In [NAME OF ORGANIZATION], there’s only three people on staff and […] I work part time. So, it's like, if you have a lot of staff that works part time, it's like juggling the internal organizational things in addition to servicing people […] …and we want to help more but we can't help because we don't have capacity to. […] Like as a small org, it gets really hard. I know that we want to do so much more, but it's just like we would fail at it all.” (KII #27)