Medical Translators

[applesxoranges, BSN, RN]

How does your hospital handle the need for translators versus what actually is done? It seems like in the ER, a lot of nurses will just use family members despite strict policies in the hospital not to use them. What if you have someone who signs?

[PacoUSA, BSN, RN]

Our hospital uses dual handset phones that connect to a translation service. During the day, there are certified staff translators that come to the bedside on request, but they only know like 3 languages. For sign language, we have MARTI, complete with a video capability.

Sent from my iPad using allnurses

At night we have no onsite translation services.

Depending on who's around, the details of the case and the conversation, the patient's capacity, and the patient's choice we use use native-speaking clinical staff, family members, native-speaking volunteers, native-speaking nonclinical staff, functionally bilingual staff, or a speaker phone to interpreter services. It just depends on the circumstances.

We serve a linguistically diverse population that includes significant representation of Spanish, Tagalog, Hmong, Russian, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Punjabi, Hindi, and Arabic.

The only live, certified interpreters we can get overnight are ASL and even they won't stay for long.

[emtb2rn, BSN, RN, EMT-B]

Language line and tele asl.