That the limited English proficient (LEP) may have a harder time in the emergency room is no surprise, since sometimes it seems that LEP is just an abbreviation for “leper” when it comes to communication. And it’s no secret that professional interpreter services in the emergency room make for happier patients and providers.
But a team of researchers at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. decided to take a closer look to figure out how different methods of interpretation delivery stacked up satisfaction-wise.
They put professionally trained medical interpreters on the floor of two New Jersey emergency rooms to provide on-site Spanish-English interpretation. This was the treatment group. The control group got the standard operating procedure for these hospitals, which included the usual mix: telephone interpreters, ad hoc interpreters, and no interpreter at all.  And guess what? Everyone preferred having [...]

I wonder how many patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) in the US health care system die each year due to the lack of care in their native language. I’ll bet it’s a lot given the health profession’s general penchant for planting so many of their patients six feet under.  After so many years in the business, I am no longer surprised by the carelessness of so many caregivers in making sure that LEP patients get the treatment that justice and compassion demand. Thank goodness for the efforts of many dedicated health care professionals to correct the problem of crossed languages in healthcare.
So it’s no surprise that the miscommunication so prevalent in hospitals and clinics extends to the pharmacy as well. Pharmacies that print prescription labels translated into Spanish often [...]

Legislative lip service talks multilingual medical care, for Medicare beneficiaries. But the best intentions of regulators still leaves lots of LEP (Limited English Proficient) patients  in the lurch. According to The California Medicare Part D Language Access Coalition report “Please Hold”, subtitled “Medicare Plans Leave Limited English Proficient Beneficiaries Waiting for Access,” getting help when you don’t speak English is tough. They had a bunch of callers playing LEP Medicade recipients call and try to get some questions answered. Responses, detailed in earlier posts, are anecdotal, and sound very familiar to what we’ve seen.
These guys were pretty hard on the telephone interpreting services that most healthcare providers rely on to improve access for non-English speakers. But as is clear from the report and again my own experience, that LEP problems don’t magically [...]

How will changes to Medicaid provisions affect care for Limited English Proficient (LEP) beneficiaries? Probably not much, despite considerable room for improvement. Click here for Part 1, where an advocacy group tried to reach out for medical help in languages other than English. The chief finding: Its’ not so easy to find someone who speaks your language if your language isn’t English. But even if you do find someone who speaks your language, your problem.
When callers connected to someone speaking their language, they often did not get the information they were seeking. Beneficiaries who connected to someone speaking their language frequently encountered inaccurate interpretation, lack of basic standards of interpretation, long wait times and unhelpful or rude customer service representatives. Sounds a lot like customer support in English! But it gets worse.
Interpreters failed [...]