Medical Interpreting: Improving Communication with Your Patients (original) (raw)

Barriers to Interpreter Use in the Medical Clinical Encounter

2009

BARRIERS TO INTERPRETER USE IN THE MEDICAL CLINICAL ENCOUNTER. Luz Evelyn Jimenez (Sponsored by William Sledge, M.D.). Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT. The Limited English Proficiency (LEP) population in the United States requires interpreters in order to receive appropriate medical care. However, interpreters are not used consistently in clinical encounters. This study aims to identify the barriers that interfere with providing this service, as well as to propose some possible ways of overcoming these barriers. A systematic review of the literature was conducted using Medline, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), and PsycINFO. Twenty articles that presented barriers to interpreter use were identified. These barriers referred to either professional interpreters or ad hoc interpreters, or were general barriers. The barriers to professional interpreter use most frequently identified related to cost. Most of ...

Medical Interpreter Challenges During In-person Interpretation Session: A Systematic Review

Journal of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues, 2021

In a world where geographic boundaries have become blurred lines, & medical treatments can be obtained in all parts of the world, the role of medical interpreters has become increasingly essential roles to attract foreign patients in the medical tourism industry. The medical interpreter acts as a mediator in bridging the gaps between medical teams and patients. However, a medical interpreter's level of ability and skills is often a restriction on an excellent interpretation session to be made. This study aims to analyse medical interpreter challenges during in-person interpretation sessions. A literature review guided by Reporting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses (ROSES) is conducted using three databases: Scopus, Dimensions, and Google Scholar. Twenty-five articles are being reviewed after undergoing the identification, screening, and eligibility process of a systematic review. These data have achieved appraisal quality as they have been reviewed by the Critical Appraisal Skill Programme (2018), CASP Qualitative Studies Checklist. Further review of these articles resulted in four main themes: language proficiency skills, communication skills, interaction with medical teams, and interaction with patients. Specific training for overcoming these barriers is suggested to encourage the development of interpreters' role in communication service. This study recommends a quantitative approach in the future to obtain precise results statically.

Improving the effectiveness of interpreted consultations: Australian interpreter, general practitioner and patient perspectives

Health & Social Care in The Community, 2017

Healthcare consultations with patients lacking English proficiency are challenging for all parties, even in Australian primary care where the engagement of interpreters is encouraged and fully subsidised. Our objective was to understand these challenges from the perspectives of interpreters, patients and general practitioners in order to improve the effectiveness of interpreted consultations. Our investigator team approached the interpreted consultation as an interprofessional collaboration.

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.

LA 871 Coursework The role of interpreters in health care settings

In recent years, the bilingual/multilingual health care has been noted by many researchers and scholars. On the one hand, it improves the quality of care for patients with limited English proficiency, on the other hand, it poses a very challenging task to the interpreters who are working in this area. A medical interpreter has a very different role and responsibility from a commercial or conference interpreter. Apart from the basic roles that should take as an interpreter, he/she is responsible for enabling professional and client, with very different backgrounds and perceptions and in an unequal relationship of power and knowledge, to communicate to their mutual satisfaction. (Shackman,).This article will discuss the three roles—conduit, coordinator and advocate that the interpreters should take in health care settings. I. Conduit Many people hold an opinion that translators are not people, they are like robots that do not have any emotions. However, when the translators are getting professional, in the healthcare settings, they also need to be like the voice, become a voice of the patient. This leads to the first role of interpreter, which is conduit. Conduit is transferring complete information, which includes all comments without information screening, and representing nonverbal message like emotion. This is the basic and default role of the translator. Conduit is the role of interpreting all the information accurately, precisely and indiscriminately and it is identified most frequently and probably the most important role in the health care setting. There are many metaphors of explaining this role-robots, voices of the patient, or the bridges of culture, socioeconomic, and various gap between their clients. Nevertheless, interpreters are trying to be perceived as invisible when conducting this role and trying to construct the provider-patient relationship as the primary relationship. Invisibility is a theory drawn by Venuti in The Translator's Invisibility (1995/2008) in which it claims that invisibility is a term that is used to 'describe a translator's situation and activity in contemporary British and American cultures' .(Venuti 2008:1). In health care settings, to reinforce the " invisibility " , interpreters are demanded to translate in first-person singular style and using verbal and nonverbal strategies to claim an invisible role. The role focuses on two facets: from the perspective of verbal strategies, it concentrates on the neutral and faithful transfer of information; on the other hand, from the perspective of nonverbal strategies, it concentrates the transfer of paralinguistic information, for example, the tone of voice, pitch as well as the emotions and attitudes that the client expresses. Through interpreting all the information indiscriminately, an interpreter allows a

Professional interpreters and their critical role in ensuring communication with other-language speaking patients

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.