Thread: Spanish interpreters in high demand at hospitals...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/200 ... ters_x.htm

Spanish interpreters in high demand at hospitals, clinics
Updated 6/25/2006 8:10 PM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this

DALLAS (AP) — Interpreting a doctor's information for her Spanish-speaking husband was the last thing Barbara Rayes wanted to do as she held her dying newborn daughter.

"It wasn't my job to interpret; that was taking away the few moments of her life that I had with her," said Rayes. "It was an unfair burden at a time of true crisis in our lives."

Nearly 15 years later, Rayes is trying to eliminate that burden for others by training interpreters and translators at the Phoenix Children's Hospital.

Interpreters trained in medical terminology, especially those speaking Spanish, are in high demand as the country's population becomes more and more diverse, said Cindy Roat of the American Translators Association. The boom in Hispanic population has led to the Spanish demand, but there's short supply of speakers of other languages as well.

In Albuquerque, Navajo and Vietnamese are in high demand, while in Seattle, Russian, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Cambodian are needed. Boston has more of a use for Portuguese, while parts of Florida get requests for Haitian Creole interpreters.

"Certainly in a medical setting understanding is a matter of life and death," said Leni Kirkman, a spokeswoman at University Hospital in San Antonio, where interpreters in Asian languages are needed.

Some hospitals are taking extra stups to attract bilingual employees.

At Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, workers are eligible for incentive pay if they speak another language, said hospital spokeswoman Lynsey Purl. Parkland and the public health system in Houston both offer in-house Spanish medical terminology classes.

But high demand for interpreters remains.

Deb Hendricks, an emergency room trauma nurse at the Children's Medical Center in Dallas, said about half of her typical 12-hour shifts are spent working with patients who only speak Spanish.

It can take hours for an interpreter to show up — a common problem across the nation — so Hendricks decided to learn the language herself at a school in Mexico set up specifically to train medical personnel in Spanish.

"Doctors are mostly pretty intelligent people. We get some who have memorized phrase books, they can make commands but they can't understand anything that's being said to them," Keith Rolle, president of the Baja Language College in Mexico. "It's stuff that you need to practice. Anyone can study out of phrase books, but it doesn't work very well in a trauma situation."

Several services offer interpretation over the telephone, a great help to emergency doctor Anthony Vita at the Medical Center of McKinney. He has access to Spanish-speaking staff at his hospital but finds that the phone services are sometimes more efficient.

"Staff just can't drop everything and be an interpreter for you," he said.

Vita said it only tqkes about 30 seconds for him to pick up one of the interpretation service phones installed in exam rooms and get an interpreter on the line, but that can be too long.

"Sometimes if it's a big emergency and (a patient is) wheeled in there, you don't have time to use that," Vita said. "You have to pull someone in to interpret."

For immigrant adults who don't speak English well, children are sometimes the only option, said Kevin Hendzel, spokesman for the American Translators Association.

Eugenia Chien, 17, had to tell her grandfather that he was in the final stages of liver cancer in Mandarin.

"If it was that traumatic for me then I wouldn't want someone younger going through that," she said. "It wasn't really a case of language, it was just a difficult piece of news to swallow in any language and to have to react right away and to make sure you deliver that information correctly."

But children face heavy pressure in those situations and sometimes misinterpret important information because they aren't trained in medical terminology, Hendzel said.

State health officials in California and New York are now considering a plan to encourage health care facilities to seek professional interpreters and discourage the use of children.

Some doctors aren't in favor of interpreters of any age in a medical setting.

Dr. Roberto Andrade, who specializes in HIV treatment at Thomas Street Health Center in Houston, and speaks English and Spanish, said interpreters can remove an important personal connection.

Doctors get most of a patient's diagnosis in a conversation about their medical history, not from labs or machines, he said.

"You don't get the emotions or feeling of the patient," Andrade said. "You don't get the soul of the patient. It's very cold, it's very fast. It is very uncomfortable, when you talk about issues you don't want in the public domain, to tell an interpreter about your problems."

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

I just have one (or two) sentence(s) to utter on this post I posted.

Read on American t-shirts and bumber stickers: "Welcome to America! Now Speak English!"

Of course this only applies to LEGAL immigrants. ILLEGAL ALIENS need to go home regardless of whether or not they speak English! Usually though, they are the foreigners mostly likely NOT TO SPEAK ENGLISH.

Adios, I hope. :P