Talk Louder? Communicating With Your Spanish Speaking Patients

Abstract

Abstract Residents often try to communicate with patients who do not speak their language. In the emergency department, residents may not feel they have enough time and resources to use interpreter services and may instead attempt to communicate with patients on their own. This can be fraught with danger. Therefore, this resource is intended to demonstrate to residents the difficulty and risk of communicating on their own or through a family member. The objective of this session is to make residents feel more comfortable using a phone or live interpreter to communicate with non-English-speaking patients and less comfortable using a family member for communication. During our implementation of this resource, the learners had very low proficiency in medical Spanish. Fifteen out of 20 had little to no fluency, and five out of 20 reported limited proficiency. We were able to demonstrate effectiveness by pre- and postsession evaluations. Prior to the session, more than half the learners were comfortable or very comfortable using a family member to interpret. After the session, only seven residents remained comfortable. Three learners were uncomfortable using an interpreter phone, and two were uncomfortable using a live interpreter before the session. Afterward, no learner was uncomfortable with either of these two methods.

Keywords

• Hispanic Americans
• Interpreters
• Latino
• Non-English Speaking