5 minute read
You’re speaking my language
School of Medicine
The value of qualified interpreters
Olivia Granja became a qualified interpreter because she hoped one day she could use her native language to help patients. But the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine third-year student never dreamed the day would come so soon.
“I was on my peds rotation at AtlantiCare, and we got a call because a woman had delivered her baby in the parking lot of the emergency room,” she said. While the team was still caring for the woman and her newborn, Granja learned that the patient only spoke Portuguese. “It turns out she was from Minas Gerais, a state in Brazil, but she was living in Newark and was on vacation in Atlantic City.”
When Granja began to speak to the new mother and her family in Portuguese, the relief was palpable. “I was able to calm her — she was obviously very worked up — and I talked to the family, too, and gave them the address of the hospital she was being transferred to.”
Qualified medical interpreters aren’t just people fluent in a certain language. The Americans with Disabilities Act defines a qualified interpreter as one “who is able to interpret effectively, accurately and impartially both receptively and expressively, using any necessary specialized vocabulary.”
According to Becky Ruckno, Geisinger’s director of health literacy and interpreting services, qualified interpreters have passed skills-based assessments. “We have had truly bilingual staff that have failed that test,” she said. “It's a different skill set. Medical terminology is very different. And I can’t tell you how beneficial it is to be in the room with a person speaking your language instead of using [the remote interpretation service] LanguageLine. There's an increased trust in the patient — you can feel it.”
Granja was in the position to fulfill this special role thanks to a new program at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.
According to Mary Lawhon Triano, MSN, CRNP-C, medical director of the school’s Clinical Skills and Simulation Center and an assistant professor of medicine, the idea for the program came from the Class of 2023. “They really pushed us as we were thinking about changes in the curriculum that pertain to social justice and health equity,” she said. “The students connected me to Becky. She’s been a fabulous advocate for the program.”
Fourth-year student Lizbeth Sandoval calls herself the new program’s “guinea pig.” She was the first to go through the process of becoming certified. As an Abigail Geisinger Scholar, she was eager to help the predominantly Spanish-speaking patients who visit Geisinger’s Wilkes-Barre primary care clinic, where she frequently rotated as a third-year student.
“I was co-president of the Latino Medical Student Association, and I knew that Professor Triano was working on this project with some upperclassmen. She is faculty advisor for the club and we were brainstorming ideas as to what we could do to meet patient needs. I am a native Spanish speaker, but we didn’t know how to approach the process of getting certified.”
Tasked with doing the “homework” on the process of getting certified, Sandoval took a special course and then took the test. “Interpretation Services at Geisinger set me up with LanguageLine, who administers the exam. Then I received a phone call and interpreted a conversation for about 30 minutes. With that, I was qualified!”
In the year since, Sandoval has put her certification to good use many times. “I've been interacting with patients, and it's been a pretty awesome experience,” she said. “It's a unique situation that you're in as a student, because you're not just the interpreter for the physician-patient interaction — you're also part of the clinical team and you have that knowledge to be able to provide. You get to interpret but then you also get to educate the patients at a completely different level than an interpreter with an iPad would be able to do. A lot of times I'll introduce myself in Spanish, and the patient’s face lights up. I still offer the opportunity for them to use the LanguageLine iPad if they prefer, but 100% of the time they've said, ‘No! No! We’d rather speak to you.’”
Becky Ruckno wholeheartedly agrees with the reaction Sandoval reports. “One of our system interpreters was recently interpreting for a patient. The nurse asked the patient, ‘Have you ever experienced sexual violence?’ and when the question was interpreted for her, the woman asked, ‘Is this safe?’ The interpreter affirmed it was, and the woman grabbed her hand and said she was abused as a small girl and never told anybody until today. Of course, everybody was crying — but that's the power of being in the room.”
