Access to Healthcare Interpreter Services: Where Are We and Where Do We Need to Go?

Alexander Bischoff,Patricia Hudelson

doi:10.3390/ijerph7072838

Abstract

Due to international migration, health care professionals in Switzerland increasingly encounter language barriers in communication with their patients. In order to examine health professionals’ attitudes and practices related to healthcare interpreting, we sent a self-administered questionnaire to heads of medical and nursing departments in public healthcare services in the canton of Basel-Stadt (N = 205, response rate 56%). Strategies used to communicate with foreign-language speaking patients differed, depending on the patient’s language. While nearly half of respondents relied on patients’ relatives to translate for Albanian, Tamil, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Portuguese and Turkish, a third did so for Spanish, and a fourth did so for Arabic. Eleven percent relied on professional interpreters for Spanish and 31% did so for Tamil and Arabic. Variations in strategies used appear to mainly reflect the availability of bilingual staff members for the different languages. Future efforts should focus on sensitizing health professionals to the problems associated with use of ad hoc interpreters, as well as facilitating access to professional interpreters.

Highlights

Increasing linguistic and cultural diversity due to migration and international mobility has challenged the Swiss health care system
A number of studies have indicated that health professionals continue to rely on untrained interpreters, despite the evidence that such practices are associated with poor quality of communication and care and breaches of confidentiality [5,6]
We describe current practices and perceptions regarding health care interpreting, and analyze the on-going challenges to ensuring access to and use of professional interpreter services for allophone patients

Summary

Introduction

Increasing linguistic and cultural diversity due to migration and international mobility has challenged the Swiss health care system. The challenges to health care posed by linguistic and cultural diversity have been extensively described [2,3], and the importance of ensuring qualified interpreters to ensure adequate patientprovider communication has been well established [4]. A national survey conducted in 1999 of 244 public and private internal medicine and psychiatric clinics and hospitals in Switzerland found that only 17% of services had access to professional interpreters [7]. Access to trained community interpreters has improved significantly since thanks to the creation of several community interpreter agencies, as well as the creation of a national community interpreters’

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Discussion

Conclusion