Authored by

Rosemary Wyber
Stephanie Davis

The role that interpreters play in health care is complex, difficult and largely unacknowledged. We couldn’t do our job without them.  

The first patient arrives, flustered and tightly wound. She’s a refugee six months post-arrival in Australia. The initial flush of finally getting here has started to fade, the winter is getting colder and her children have to take three buses to school. She has increasing requests from her employment services provider to complete English classes and think about looking for work. In the country she left, the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate and the messages from family left behind are less frequent but more distressing. She’s ostensibly here to follow up on some outstanding blood results from her new arrival refugee health assessment, but it’s clear from the outset there’s going to be a lot more to manage here.

Like almost all of our consults, this appointment is made possible through the Translating and Interpreting Services (TIS National). We dial in, provide some details and — almost miraculously, within minutes — are connected to someone who speaks English and the language of the patient in front of us.

Communication between the patient and doctor is perhaps the foundation of medicine. International Translation Day falls on 30 September, formalised by the United Nations in 2017 to acknowledge the work of all language professionals and their role in world peace and security. The date was chosen in honour of Saint Jerome, a priest from Northern Italy known primarily for translating the Bible into Latin from Greek and Hebrew and considered the patron saint of translators. We want to celebrate the daily contribution of a largely unacknowledged workforce in the clinical space, the Translating and Interpreting Service (TIS National).

The nature of the refugee health service where we work means we use mostly on-call telephone interpreters rather than pre-booked or face-to-face services. Although the interpreters are rostered on to take calls, they are going about their day — sometimes with washing dishes, barking dogs or pedestrian crossings in the background — when we’re connected by the operator, they step out of their worlds and immediately into the intimacy of a consult room.

Source:https://insightplus.mja.com.au/

Full article: https://insightplus.mja.com.au/2024/39/celebrating-health-care-interpreters-on-international-translation-day/