Interpreter Policy and Healthcare: Policy determinants and current issues (original) (raw)
Related papers
Access to Healthcare Interpreter Services: Where Are We and Where Do We Need to Go?
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2010
Due to international migration, health care professionals in Switzerland increasingly encounter language barriers in communication with their patients. In order to examine health professionals' attitudes and practices related to healthcare interpreting, we sent a self-administered questionnaire to heads of medical and nursing departments in public healthcare services in the canton of Basel-Stadt (N = 205, response rate 56%). Strategies used to communicate with foreign-language speaking patients differed, depending on the patient's language. While nearly half of respondents relied on patients' relatives to translate for Albanian, Tamil, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Portuguese and Turkish, a third did so for Spanish, and a fourth did so for Arabic. Eleven percent relied on professional interpreters for Spanish and 31% did so for Tamil and Arabic. Variations in strategies used appear to mainly reflect the availability of bilingual staff members for the different languages. Future efforts should focus on sensitizing health professionals to the problems associated with use of ad hoc interpreters, as well as facilitating access to professional interpreters.
Pay Now Or Pay Later: Providing Interpreter Services In Health Care
Health Affairs, 2005
Research amply documents that language barriers impede access to health care, compromise quality of care, and increase the risk of adverse health outcomes among patients with limited English proficiency. Federal civil rights policy obligates health care providers to supply language services, but wide gaps persist because insurers typically do not pay for interpreters, among other reasons. Health care financing policies should reinforce existing medical research and legal policies: Payers, including Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurers, should develop mechanisms to pay for interpretation services for patients who speak limited English.
Impact of interpreter services on delivery of health care to limited-English-proficient patients
Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2001
To determine whether professional interpreter services increase the delivery of health care to limited ± English-proficient patients. DESIGN: Two-year retrospective cohort study during which professional interpreter services for Portuguese and Spanishspeaking patients were instituted between years one and two. Preventive and clinical service information was extracted from computerized medical records.
Language barriers in health care settings: An annotated bibliography of the research literature
2003
Jacobs spends the majority of her time conducting research on access to, and cultural specificity of, medical care delivered to minority patients. She has conducted research on the impact of providing adequate interpreter services on the cost and quality of care provided to patients with limited English proficiency. She continues to do research in this area and has served on advisory panels for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Hablamos Juntos initiative to improve patient-provider communication for Latinos and several Office of Minority Health projects focused on reducing linguistic and cultural barriers to access to health care. In addition, she cares for patients in a neighborhood health center, works with other investigators to design culturally specific research and teaches medical students, residents and faculty about practicing culturally sensitive medicine. Niels Agger-Gupta, Ph.D., is a consultant specializing in linguistic access to health care. He helps private and public sector health organizations design and conduct research related to language barriers to health care and advises on the design and implementation of cultural and linguistic competency standards. He holds a doctorate in Human & Organizational Systems from the Fielding Graduate Institute. His dissertation, published in 2001, focused on the emergence of and best practices in the health care interpreting profession in 14 health organizations across the U.S. and Canada. He is the former Executive Director of the California Healthcare Interpreters Association and is a co-author of the "California Standards for Healthcare Interpreters: Ethics, Protocols and Guidance on Roles and Intervention." He also previously worked with the senior management team of the Calgary Regional Health Authority in Alberta, Canada, helping them to develop health care interpreter policy and a process for interpreter implementation and was a consultant with the Alberta Multiculturalism Commission between 1987 and 1998.
Intercultural-Communication-Challenge_-The-Interpreter's-Role-in-Health-Care-Interpreting.pdf
Redefining the Role of Translation and Interpreting in Cultural Evolution, 2018
A leader in community interpreting, Australia provides professional interpreting services within its public health system. Healthcare interpreters face various challenges for a variety of reasons, including cultural differences. Existing research on healthcare interpreting focuses on differences between a mainstream culture of healthcare professionals and ethnically diverse cultures of migrant patients. Interpreters are widely regarded as bicultural professionals able to provide cultural information on behalf of patients as necessary or whenever healthcare professionals ask for it. However, research on healthcare interpreting in a globalized era should consider the changing nature of culture. The question of whether the interpreter should be a cultural broker remains controversial. Based on an ethnographic study of healthcare interpreters at a public hospital in Australia, this chapter aims to survey how multiple perspectives on cultural evolution affect healthcare interpreting.
Health Communication, 2017
Our objective was to describe when Hmong-and Spanish-speaking limited English proficient (LEP) patients perceive an interpreter was needed and how they perceive the decision to utilize an interpreter is made in a health care encounter. We interviewed a total of 20 LEP patients. We used a number of strategies to recruit LEP patients including posting language-appropriate flyers at clinics, sending letters to LEP patients and asking our participants to refer their family and friends to participate in our study. Tape-recorded interviews were transcribed, translated, and systematically coded using directed content analysis. Patients identified two factors that influenced LEP Hmong-and Spanish-speaking patients' perception of when interpreters were needed: (1) their self-identified level of English proficiency and (2) the anticipated complexity of the health care communication. They described three factors that they perceived influenced the decision to utilize interpreters: (1) their self-identified level of English proficiency, (2) access to interpreters; and (3) health system automation of interpreter use. The findings show that patients consider a wide variety of factors when determining if an interpreter is necessary and how the decision to utilize interpreters is made. Given that health care decision making is complex, healthcare systems need to do more to help educate LEP patients of the importance of utilizing interpreters in all healthcare encounters. Additionally, future research should to explore how patients conceptualize
International Journal for Translation and Interpreting Research, 2018
This paper has policy as its starting point, relating both to society in general and to healthcare in particular. In Australia, both social and health policy coincide in their advocacy for language (interpreting) services, with the optimisation of healthcare outcomes for patients a desirable outcome of both. This paper relates these macro-level directives to the development of a hospital-wide Cultural Responsiveness Plan that represents policy guidelines at a lower level, and the way that this plan was applied and operationalised at a major public health facility, Northern Health in Melbourne, servicing up to 1 million people. Through the re-establishment of language services, a policy of transcultural training for all new and existing staff, and hospital-wide dissemination of information relating to communicating with limited English proficiency (LEP) patients, a 317% increase is recorded in the requests for interpreters at patient occasions of service (OOS) over an 8-year period. This increase is largely met by the further employment of in-house interpreters, whose cost per OOS drops in proportion to the greater efficiencies that are derived from in-house staff. The augmentation of interpreting services correlates with a 28% decrease in average LEP patient length of stay in hospital, with a decrease in the difference of re-admission rates amongst this group compared to those speaking English. This paper uses demographic data to quantify the likely percentage of LEP patients at Northern Health and matches these against the augmented level of service to show how far this is from a comprehensive or universal level of service which is usually one of the stated aims of macro-and local-level policy. Statistical data gathered longitudinally are presented alongside excerpts taken from interviews with three groups of informants: in-house interpreters, hospital managers outside language services, external language services stakeholders.
2017
In our current societies, people from different backgrounds and cultures who speak different languages live together. This rich mixture of cultures and languages also implies some challenges for the functioning of and access to public services, including healthcare, as people who do not speak the official language of the place they live in have the right to access public services in the same conditions as native speakers. The barriers raised by linguistic and cultural disparity become even more obvious when healthcare is considered from a humanistic perspective, as language barriers in healthcare very frequently lead to a lower quality in health services, worse patient health outcomes and greater treatment costs. It has already been proved, however, that the best remedy to overcome these language and culture-based communicative problems is to resort to professional interpreters. This contribution describes a set of case studies that have been extracted from a corpus of real conversations recorded from medical consultations with patients who did not speak the language of healthcare providers. Our aim is to discuss how healthcare interpreters work (and how they should work) in order for communication to be improved and assistance to be enhanced through the intervention of professional interpreters.