تفسیر پزشکی در عمل سرپایی Medical Interpreters in Outpatient Practice

MEDICAL INTERPRETERS IN OUTPATIENT PRACTICE Unless they are traveling and become ill in a non-English–speaking country, it is likely that most English-speaking clinicians in the United States have never had the experience of explaining their illness symptoms to a health professional who didn’t speak their language. But, for millions of people with limited English proficiency (LEP) living in the United States, this is an everyday occurrence. The United States is changing demographically. According to the most recent US Census, from 2010 to 2014, about 62 million people (born in the United States or another country) spoke a language other than English at home.1 About 41% of these individuals (25 million people) have LEP, defined in the census as individuals older than 5 years who speak English “less than very well.”1 The Census Bureau projects a similar percentage on into 2020.2 Medical professionals who work with LEP patients should rely on trained and, ideally, certified, medical interpreters to give them the best comprehension of what a patient is saying. Having a patient try to get by with limited English, using untrained bilingual staff or family members, or having clinicians use their limited language ability (for example, high school Spanish) to communicate in the patient’s language, can have dire consequences both for the patient and the clinician. Consider this wellknown real-life example: understood this to mean that the boy was intoxicated – though in the Cuban dialect, the boy was actually saying that he was “nauseated.” He received care for a drug overdose attributed to substance abuse but developed paraplegia, subsequently found to be due to a ruptured intracranial aneurysm. The case led to malpractice lawsuit with a $71 million award to the plaintiff.