“It’s the difference between life and death”: The views of professional medical interpreters on their role in the delivery of safe care to patients with limited English proficiency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) experience poorer quality care and more adverse events in hospital. Consequently, there is interest in understanding the role of professional medical interpreters in efforts to improve patient safety. OBJECTIVE: To describe the views of professional medical interpreters on their role in the delivery of safe patient care. DESIGN: Qualitative analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews. PARTICIPANTS: 15 professional medical interpreters affiliated with the Healthcare Interpretation Network in Toronto, Canada. APPROACH: Participants' views on their role in patient safety were analyzed and organized into themes. KEY RESULTS: Professional medical interpreters described being uniquely situated to identify and prevent adverse events involving patients with LEP by: 1) facilitating communication and enhancing patients' comprehension, 2) giving voice to patients, and 3) speaking up about safety concerns. Participants described a tension between 'speaking up' and interpreters' ethical imperative to remain impartial. Interpreters also highlighted several challenges, including 4) medical hierarchy and healthcare providers' limited knowledge of the role of interpreters. These challenges introduced safety issues if providers asked interpreters to act outside of their scope of practice. CONCLUSIONS: Our study found that professional medical interpreters view their work as integral to the delivery of safe care to patients with LEP. In order to effectively engage in patient safety efforts together, interpreters and providers require a mutual understanding of their roles. Team hierarchy and limited provider knowledge of the role of interpreters can introduce safety concerns. In addition, interpreters describe a tension between "speaking up" about patient safety and the need for interpreters to remain impartial when facilitating communication. Healthcare institutions, providers, and interpreters must engage in discussion on how to best to "speak up" and integrate interpreters into safety efforts. Importantly, the benefits of partnering with interpreters can only be realized when providers consistently use their services.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".