Why is it vital to provide professional medical interpreting services in hospitals?

In all corners of the world, professional medical interpreting services have become one of the necessities in real life. This is vital in both hospitals and any other medical institution. Because not all medical personnel know the language of the patient nor does the patient. So, to bridge the gap between the sick and medical service providers, employing medical interpreters is idle. As we all know that sickness doesn’t understand some thing called language barrier in any way, one can then become sick irrespective of language status. You can imagine a situation whereby you go to seek medical attention and all medical workers do not understand your language. Or just your deaf and you need medical care. What will you do? Will you accept to die because you’re unable to explain your sickness to medical experts? In fact, those questions demand answers from patients, medical persons and government.
What are the importance of employing medical interpreters?
If you’ve ever thought of employing medical interpreters in any medical institution, you deserve high appreciation from wherever you go. This is because you mind a lot about the lives of the people. Also, it seems you understand challenges both patients and medical service providers face in administering treatment. So, please go ahead and do so. Embracing the services of medical interpreters in medical field helps a lot in one way of other.
Employing medical interpreters increases the quality of medical care. Medical interpreters help a lot in bridging communication gaps between the patient and medical service provider. Since the medical interpreters provide smooth communication between the patient and the service provider, prescription and administering the drug is perfect. Furthermore, professional medical interpreters help to minimize misdiagnoses. Assuming that you are a medical service provider in your locality and a foreigner who speaks a different language that you don’t understand comes to seek medical attention, what are the chances of misdiagnosis of that patients’ sickness? Factors like observing signs and symptoms from patients cannot be 100% accurate. There is massive need to understand many things from the patient before commencing treatment. So, if you don’t understand patient language. How accurate will you be?
Medical interpreting services also helps to reduce cost of treatment. If there is a medical interpreter to assist the deaf or patient with little proficiency to communicate well with service providers, it will be easy to detect the disease and administer right treatment. Thus, reducing the cost of seeking medical attention elsewhere.
Trust and great client satisfaction. Everybody feels handled well in the language he/she understands well. The patient will always feel happy to communicate to clinical officers in the language he/she understands best. Therefore, making interpreting services essential.
Qualities professional medical interpreters
• Professional medical interpreters must highly be trained in medical field and familiar with medical terminology
• They should be certified
• Professional medical interpreters should be culturally informed.
• Good listener
• Relevant experience
All in all, using a mere bilingual interpreter may not solve the problem. Employing un trained and un certified interpreters may result in to both lawsuits and death of the patient. This is because the interpreter may mislead the medical service provider. So, all medical institutions, services providers should stop using un qualified interpreters, relatives and others. These people may not be familiar with the medical terminologies. However, medical institutions should employ well trained medical interpreters with adequate experience to handle all medical interpreting issues.