A recent article in Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News highlights the need for translation services in healthcare settings.

Dr. Lisa Diamond. Photo by Richard DeWitt.

As MSK’s Dr. Lisa Diamond explains in the piece, physician familiarity with a language does not mean the doctor can communicate medical concepts with a patient in that idiom. By law, health care providers must offer professional language services to patients in need of them. But too often, translation comes from well-intentioned but untrained staff or a patient’s family members.

Dr. Diamond and colleagues published a study in 2016 in which they analyzed surgeons’ use of interpreters at a medical center in Boston. Although this hospital has a robust interpreter service, if the wait time for an interpreter were longer than 15 minutes surgeons were more likely to use their non-English language skills or a patient’s family members, including children, as interpreters.

In the Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News article, Dr. Diamond offers one potential solution: an opt-out, rather than an opt-in system, for interpreter services. This would require language preferences to be recorded in a patient’s health record so that every patient in need of interpretation had an interpreter assigned to them.

Learn more about MSK’s Language Assistance Program.