Coronavirus Patients Who Don ’t Speak English Could End Up ‘Unable to Communicate in Their Last Moments of Life’

At the University of Louisville hospital in Kentucky, dozens of patients each day need the help of an interpreter to understand their medical conditions and make informed choices about their care. Before patients in the area showed COVID-19 symptoms, medical interpreters provided translations for as many as 30-40 people each day in Spanish or Amharic—a language spoken primarily in Ethiopia. Like the estimated 100,000 interpreters who work at hospitals across the country, their services — translating word-for-word between doctor and patient, maintaining patient confidentiality and accounting for cultural nuances — can mean the difference between life or death. “Any good doctor is only as good as how they are understood by the patient,” says Natalya Mytareva, executive director of the Certification Commission for Health Care Interpreters (CCHI), one of the national certifying bodies for medical interpreters. “If the doctor is basing the diagnosis on the wrong information because they didn’t have an interpreter, then what good is that doctor?” As Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, becomes one of the hardest hit counties in the state (42 people have died there of COVID-19 as of Monday morning, the most of any Kentucky county so far, according to data by Johns Hopkins University), the number of patients in need of care at the hospital is even higher. But the hospital’s nine medical interpreters are mostly gone. On Ma...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 feature News Desk Source Type: news