Interpreting in the Emergency Department: How Context Matters for Practice

Abstract

The literature on medical interpreting shows that lack of a common language between a patient and a doctor is a major cause of health disparities in healthcare in multilingual environment. This problem is exacerbated around the world by the fact that emergency departments are becoming increasingly diverse and cater for multicultural as well as multilingual societies. Language barriers pose frequent problems between patients and caregivers, and this contribution stems from a project that is seeking to identify ways of dealing more effectively with multilingualism on in hospitals. As 80% of the diagnosis depends on oral communication, medical mishaps in emergency departments often result from vulnerable communication processes, due to language barriers; this area of research is under-represented in the growing focus on medical interpreting. Furthermore, considering that the conditions for communication in emergency departments are very different from primary care settings, this contribution presents the results of a research conducted to better understand interpreting needs in this context. This chapter hence reports on practices, emerging needs, and varying degrees of concerted, institutional responses in two specific local contexts (in which the research was carried out) that may be representative of endemic situations.

The authors would like to thank Denise Cameron, Stewart Sanson, and Anneleen Vandeplas for their valuable suggestions and feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.