Poor communication between doctors and patients resulting from hospitals and clinics use of bilingual works and family members has caused enough harm.  A recent journal in the Pediatrics highlights that translation errors are common and can be dangerous. Dr. Glenn Flores and colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Boston University examined the transcripts of 13 audiotape visits of Spanish speaking patients to pediatric clinic. Six encounters involved an official hospital interpreter; seven involved an ad hoc interpreter like a nurse, Social worker, or in one case an 11 year – old sibling. The official interpreter made 231 errors: 53% of them were judged to have the potential to cause clinical problems. The ad hoc interpreters made 165 errors, and 77% of them were potentially dangerous.

Some errors included the interpreters omitting questions about drug allergies, telling a mother to put a steroid cream on an infant’s entire body instead of just the face, telling a mother to give an antibiotic for two days instead of 10, telling a mother to put an oral antibiotic into her child’s ears instead of the mouth, using a Puerto Rican slang word for mumps, which he says central American mother could not understand. Observing interpreters add comments, like telling a mother not to answer the doctor’s questions about sexually transmitted diseases or drug use.

According to Dr. Glenn Flores and colleagues at the MedicalCollege of Wisconsin and BostonUniversity, this study indicates that, although the hospital interpreter’s errors were significantly less likely to cause problems than those of the ad hoc interpreters, findings support the conclusion that most hospital interpreters do not receive adequate training. He goes further to highlight how interpreting errors can put hospitals and physicians in legal jeopardy and used the 1984 example of a 22year – old man that won a $71 million settlement after he asserted that a group of paramedics, doctors and emergency room workers at a South Florida hospital had misdiagnosed a brain clot. The patients’ relatives used the Spanish word “Intoxicado” to describe his ailment. They meant that he was nauseated, but the medical staff interpreted the word to mean intoxicated, a valid meaning in some cultures, and treated him for a drug overdose. (New York Times, April 7, 2003, Erin Marcus)

Medical interpreter is an absolute necessity in the provision of health care to avoid misdiagnosis and subsequently financial disaster that are more likely to occur due to unlimited doctor visits, poor communication and frequent emergency situations. American Medical News; January 22, 1996 suggests that poor communication between patients and their doctor’s leads to three additional office visits for the physician to collectively understand what the problem is. Since the first two visits aren’t good enough to deter communication problem, errors in Medical Interpretation and their Potential Clinical Consequences in Pediatric Encounters

To avoid much being lost into translation as immigrants struggle to understand their doctors;
We encourage hospitals and community clinics to be sensitive, and be more proactive while serving people with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and by communicating effectively and clearly about their policies. We are currently working hard to identify the best practice model that can be adopted by every hospital and community clinic receiving federal funding and encourage all health care providers to join the Language Access Coalition and help us strategies on how to achieve this objective and minimize errors in Medical Interpretation.
We are here today seeking your support in making this campaign a success and making language less of a barrier for people who don’t speak English as their primary language

What can you do?

If you know people whose children had to translate for them in the delivery room, people who have had janitors working at health care facilities translate for them because no health care professional nearby spoke their language, or have been treated for the wrong reason because you don’t speak English fluently we need your help!