Bilingual Brown students act as medical interpreters at R.I. Hospital

Interpreter's Aide Program helps meet a growing need

by Kristen Cole

Desperate and screaming, a mother runs into an emergency room carrying a limp child, but the doctors and nurses may not be able to base their response on her description of events because they do not speak her language.

For the past seven years, bilingual Brown students have volunteered in the adult and pediatric emergency rooms of Rhode Island Hospital providing translation at such critical moments.

"It is clear that when physicians and patients can't understand each other, good health is impossible," said Alicia Monroe, director of faculty development in the Department of Family Medicine at Brown University/Memorial Hospital Family Residency Program.

To facilitate the communication between health care workers and patients, more than 30 Brown students trained as medical interpreters in the Interpreter's Aide Program. This semester, half of those volunteered to commit at least four hours a week at the hospital.

Monroe described the collaborative effort among Brown students, the Rhode Island Hospital Department of Social Work, and Brown Medical School in the most recent issue of Academic Medicine.

Although Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires that interpretation services be available in health care institutions to people who speak limited English, many institutions struggle to reach full compliance, said Monroe.

Rhode Island Hospital employs professionals to provide interpretation but the need for services exceeds the capacity of the interpreters. In 1996, interpretation of Spanish was most often sought (73 percent) followed by 7.5 percent for Russian, 7 percent for Portuguese, 4.4 percent for Cambodian, 3.6 percent for Armenian and 4.5 percent for all other languages.

Originally proposed in response to the large need for interpretation services in the emergency department, the Interpreter's Aide Program is now available in several departments of Rhode Island Hospital, including subspecialty clinics, internal medicine clinic and radiology.

Students from the Brown Medical School and the undergraduate campus can volunteer as part of the Interpreter's Aide Program, said Monroe. They qualify by shadowing professional interpreters and taking oral and written exams.

"It's a great exposure to the hospital environment," said Patricia Wissar, one of two undergraduate student coordinators for the Interpreter's Aide Program. "I love doing it. Once you start, you get hooked."

The Interpreter's Aide Program is a model that may be used anywhere there is a college or university where the population is increasingly diverse, according Monroe.

The program enables students to gain insight into the ways in which verbal and nonverbal communication can influence health care while developing cross-cultural skills, Monroe said.

Even native-Spanish speaking students will learn new words and notice cultural differences among people from different countries, said Wissar, who migrated from Peru at the age of 13 and is a premed student.

And it is a good way to see the relevancy of all the coursework that goes into a career in medicine. "As one of my friends said, 'When you're in chemistry class you wonder why am I taking this?' Then she goes to the hospital and gets motivated," said Wissar.