Workforce Language Services

When I was teaching English as a Second Language to low-income mothers in a family literacy program, I’d often become horrified as the mothers shared with me stories of frustration and miscommunication during their visits to the local health care clinic.  Often there’d be no one to explain in Spanish during doctor’s visits and on the occasions that there were, the clinic would simply grab a bilingual person to help out since there were very few certified interpreters on staff.

 The Rush-Copley Medical Center in Aurora, Illinois is making sure that these situations never occur in their facility:

“We are going to celebrate the [interpretation] program’s 30th anniversary this June,” says Diane Moreau, BA, BS, director of patient support services and a Spanish interpreter. “We have eight full-time interpreters who are able to cover all shifts in the operation of the hospital.”

Moreau’s interpreters see 75 to 80 patients a day, and they spend 30 minutes on average with each patient; however, sessions easily can be two or three hours long.

“The area where the most help is needed is triage and the ER,” she says. “Clear communication is very important, especially if the patient is in pain. The faster we gather information on the patients’ conditions, the faster we can give them the care they need.”

The other area where interpreters are in high need is during patient discharge.

“Discharging a patient can easily take an hour and a half, and the interpreters are present to make sure patients understand every detail about their condition and what they need to do after leaving the hospital,” says Moreau. “It’s much better to have the interpreter in the room because teaching or demonstrating something over the phone is very difficult. We can’t ignore the importance of nonverbal communication, either.”

The Nurse.com article also brings up the point that Latinos are underrepresented in the medical field, thus increasing the difficulty of providing cultural competent medical care in a patient’s native language.  One tactic would be to recruit bilingual Latinos into the medical field so that patients could speak directly to the care provider in Spanish rather than rely on a third-party, albeit highly qualified, interpreter.