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Hospitals hurting for interpreters
This story was published Friday, July 22nd, 2005

By Andrew Sirocchi, Herald staff writer

To Natividad Heredia, the MRI machine at Kadlec Medical Center was as foreign as the language spoken by her nurses.

Heredia, a Pasco woman who speaks only Spanish, was at Kadlec on Wednesday, and for the first time submitted to a magnetic resonance imaging test. What would they do to her, Heredia wondered. Would she be sedated? Would doctors and nurses understand her if she told them she was claustrophobic?

"She was a little nervous," said Juan Zuniga, Kadlec's in-house interpreter. "Just knowing, in her own language, what's she's going through -- helps. Just knowing that if something happens, she can ask for help. That's reassuring, too."

Zuniga stood alongside Heredia's nurse Wednesday as the patient was rolled through the large tube-like MRI machine. The procedure went off without a hitch, but it shows that translation services such as Zuniga's increasingly are in demand these days.

A national report recently released by the Center for Immigration Studies found that in 2003 a record 23 percent of all births in the United States were to immigrant mothers, and that it's not just maternity wards that are in need for interpreters. All facets of the medical profession are finding they need to have more and fill the needs of their patients.

"It's skyrocketing," said Johnean Hansen, Kadlec's coordinator for interpreter services, of the need for bilingual speakers who can translate communications from doctors and nurses.

Hansen said Kadlec's need has grown so much since the hospital began monitoring its requests in 2000 that it may bring on a second Spanish-speaking interpreter. Zuniga works 40 hours per week, five days a week. The hospital needs more and uses two interpreting contractors to fill the void. In dire situations, Hansen said the hospital falls back on a phone-based interpreting service. Although that's never preferred, sometimes it's inevitable.

That's particularly true in the Tri-Cities. The Mid-Columbia ranks as one of the most linguistically diverse regions in Washington.

A study released by the U.S. English Foundation this year found 29 different languages prevalent in the Tri-Cities. In addition to English and Spanish, Laotian, German, French, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian and Bosnian also are common. Others frequently heard include Chinese, Sudanese and Tagalog.

Hansen said Kadlec most often receives requests for Spanish-speaking interpreters, but added that the hospital's records also show demand for interpreters who speak Bosnian, Vietnamese, Laotian, Russian, Ukrainian and Mandarin.

Melanie Jones, spokeswoman for Lourdes Medical Center in Pasco, said Lourdes has hired an in-house Spanish-speaking interpreter to address the most common needs of immigrant patients and also tries to hire other bilingual staff.

But that can be challenging, Jones said, especially when all types of medical staff are in high demand.

"When you begin to hire people who are qualified for a position and also meet the requirement of speaking another language, the applicant pool is much smaller," Jones said. "You're looking for a physician who is an OB/GYN who has 'X' years of experience and speaks a different language as well as English. The applicant pool for that position is going to be much smaller."

That hasn't stopped Lourdes from trying, particularly because the demographics show the immigrant population is growing and will continue to do so.

The Center for Immigration Studies reported that 2002's record high percentage of births to immigrant mothers was part of a trend that began in 1970.

While the center acknowledges that a larger immigrant population base partly is responsible, those already residents of America are having fewer babies themselves.

In Washington state, for example, immigrant births doubled from 1990 to 2002. In 2002, though, U.S. citizens living here had fewer children than any time since 1980, according to the center's statistics.

Lourdes doesn't ask prospective mothers where they were born, Jones said, but there is evidence that the need for interpreters in the Mid-Columbia is growing.

Yakima County already is among the 50 counties in the United States where immigrants accounted for the largest share of births in 2002, the center's reports indicate.

And while more than 17,000 immigrant children and parents in Washington state lost public health coverage since the elimination of a public medical assistance program in 2002, hospitals and medical centers expect to continue working toward increasing their interpreting base.

"Everybody has the right to have their medical needs communicated to them in a language they can understand," Kadlec's Hansen said. "Whether it be in English -- because doctors speak in their own medical jargon -- or sign language."