Talking to patients in their own language is paramount at Parkland
Interpretation services provided in more than 240 languages
Hospitals and healthcare systems can be rife with medical terminology and acronyms, and regardless of what language one speaks, it can sound like a bunch of gibberish. But thanks to a group of highly trained interpreters, patients at Parkland Health receive the healthcare information they need in a language they understand.
Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin is prohibited. Therefore, healthcare providers, including hospitals, that receive federal funding such as Medicare and Medicaid are required to provide language access services for their patients free of charge.
At Parkland, Dallas County’s public hospital, it means services are provided in more than 240 different languages. In fiscal year 2022, there were more than 1,992,300 interpretations provided to limited English proficiency (LEP) patients system wide. While most of the interpretations were for Spanish-speaking patients, there were also patients who spoke Vietnamese, Arabic, Burmese and lesser-known languages such as Tigrinya (spoken in the Horn region of Africa and the Tigray region of Northern Ethiopia), Urdu (the national language of Pakistan) and Malayalam, which is spoken mainly in India. To meet those needs, Parkland uses a variety of vendors delivered through a video-capable platform.
Although there are hundreds of bilingual staff in the Parkland system, the number of medical interpreters totals about 120. That’s because staff must pass a proficiency test followed by two months of training comprised of learning medical terminology, participating in scenarios involving interpreters and working with a preceptor.
“Bilingual conversational staff are incredibly important for an organization such as Parkland where many of our patients are Spanish-speaking,” said Wendy Young, RN, Parkland’s Director of Language Services. “They can help our patients with directions and answer basic questions. They just can’t interpret anything involving clinical information. That’s the job of our medical interpreters.”
Serving in the role is not easy, Young said, adding that medical interpreters listen to what providers are saying in English, process it in their heads, then interpret the information into the correct Spanish for the patient. “Just because a person speaks Spanish, doesn’t mean it’s all the same Spanish,” Young said. “A person could be from Mexico, Spain, Venezuela, Puerto Rico or elsewhere. Our interpreters have to be aware of the nuances of the language in different regions.”
They also must have the ability to distance themselves from their job. A feat that can sometimes be difficult, according to Cristina Ornelas, a Senior Medical Interpreter at Parkland.
“You have to put your feelings aside, but sometimes it’s hard because you’re human. You feel these things but at the same time you can’t break down because even though you’re empathetic, this isn’t your situation,” Ornelas said.
Still, it can be hard.
Ornelas, who is a cancer survivor, said a recent call for an interpreter was harder than most. “The provider had to tell a patient whose cancer had spread that there was nothing more medically that could be done,” she said. “His adult children were with him and were trying to be strong, but they were obviously devastated. It was especially hard when the dad said he understood and wanted to leave the hospital to spend his last days, weeks or whatever time he had at home.”
The encounter struck a chord with Ornelas, who said once the visit was completed, she found a quiet area and called her own father. “I just wanted him to know how grateful I was to have him,” she said, a hush coming over her voice.
At the end of the day, Ornelas, who has been serving as a medical interpreter for three years, takes great pride in the service she and her colleagues provide. “We see how grateful our patients and their families are,” she said. “And it’s great when we have families we’ve been working with for a long time finally get to take their baby home from the neonatal intensive care unit, or a patient is discharged because they’re doing so much better.”
Even if the law didn’t mandate Parkland provide language assistance services for our LEP patients, it is the right thing to do for the business and our patients, Young said.
“Healthcare can be highly complex and often difficult to understand. If we can make it easier for our patients, then the benefits are three-fold: they recover more quickly because they know what they need to be doing, it reduces the hospital readmission rates and it lowers the cost to the taxpayers of Dallas County,” she said.
For more information about Parkland’s services, visit www.parklandhealth.org. To apply for a job as a medical interpreter, please visit www.parklandcareers.com.
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