"Do You Speak The Language?  Providing Linguistically Appropriate Care"


Following are selected quotes from this March 2009 Trustee Magazine article.  Read the entire text here >>


A large part of a hospital's provision of culturally competent care means providing adequate language services for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP).

To be truly culturally competent, hospitals must face the fact that roughly 23 million people living in the United States have LEP-and a good share of them will be coming through their doors.

"Diversity is here to stay," says linguistic consultant and interpreter trainer Linda Joyce. "Our nation is becoming more diverse, more spread out over the whole country. If hospitals are interested in safety and quality, language and culture need to be addressed in every department; it has to be part of hospitals' goals and strategy. It can't be an ancillary service; it must be a funded core service."

"Language permeates all areas of the hospital," says International Medical Interpreter Association (IMIA) president Izabel Arocha. "It serves all departments in the hospital and is not a separate service. Everything is affected by language access."

"Hospitals don't have the knowledge they need for language services," Arocha says. "Language services need to be accurate for patient safety. There is liability for hospitals who do not have interpreters. Health outcomes are related to communication errors."

"I want to see interpreters accepted as equal members of the treatment team," Linda Joyce (former director of language interpretive services at Grady Health System in Atlanta) says. "Communication is 80 percent of treatment, and it must be accurate. We interpret meaning for meaning, taking in cultural considerations. The role of the interpreter is to be transparent so that the patient and provider talk to and look at each other, not at the interpreter."

Linda Joyce is involved with seeking national certification for medical interpreters through the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care. The council has already produced ethics and best practices that Joyce says professional medical interpreters strive to follow.

"A patient should be able to walk into any hospital in the U.S., and if he doesn't speak English, he must receive language assistance," says Marty Conroy, manager of Public Health Initiatives for Language Line Services.

(Reprinted by permission of Trustee Magazine)

You can find the entire article here >>