What's Lost in Translation: A Structured Series of Dialogues Exploring Challenges Experienced by Medical Interpreters Providing End-of-Life Care and Offering Strategies to Overcome Them (FR416)

Abstract

•Gain the ability to describe the impact of including professional interpreters in family meetings to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers to palliative care.•Identify linguistic and cultural challenges faced by interpreters during palliative care encounters and describe methods the palliative care clinician can use to support and enhance the role of the interpreter in these encounters.•List at least three reasons why pre-encounter huddles with interpreters are needed for optimal communication across language and cultural barriers, and three strategies interpreters can use to optimize their chances of being included in the huddle. The United States is becoming increasingly diverse with over 300 languages spoken in homes across the country. When this diversity of language and culture is encountered in healthcare settings, our Western healthcare culture may bump up against that of a patient and family. Language barriers may result in healthcare disparities when professional medical interpreters are not available or not accessed. The need for effective navigation of language and cultural barriers is no more urgent than in the field of palliative care, health care that emphasizes effective communication and attention to psychosocial needs of patients and families. Effective communication across cultural and linguistic barriers requires the skills of professional medical interpreters. It also requires good teamwork between providers and medical interpreters. Yet this teamwork can present challenges as interpreters are not always members of a palliative care team, and may not even be known to the palliative care team. Providers may have a limited view of interpreters as language conduits doing little more than providing a translation of what they say. The presenters created a series of facilitated dialogues with professional medical interpreters to learn from them about their needs, their challenges and how to better work with them to improve patient care and to mediate their experience of vicarious trauma. These dialogues included interpreters, physicians, social workers and a chaplain all from the palliative care team at a large tertiary care inpatient facility. Interpreters shared their unique stressors. These included difficulties interpreting end of life vocabulary, violating cultural norms of their patients and families, experiencing emotional, cognitive and mental stress when not included in pre-encounter huddles. This presentation will provide participants with a description of how the dialogues were developed, lessons learned from having the conversations and the value of this modality for improving interpreter/provider communication.