PHNs: Does your PH department provide interpreters and who pays for them?

[Mia415]

Hello fellow Public Health Nurses! Could you please tell me if your local public health dept. provides IN PERSON live interpreters for your services to non English speaking patients? What about optional services and NON mandatory programs? If you are comfortable, please share which programs and what county?

I am with an optional program, Nurse Home Visiting Program with Maternal Child Adolescent Health. We have a full time Spanish interpreter on staff (her actual title is community outreach worker, so she does other stuff too) but she's on our payroll and Spanish is not an issue. We also have Urdu, Vietnamese, cambodian, laoatian, Hmong, ma'am, Farsi, and Arabic clients that we basically cannot provide in person interpreters for. Because we have had to turn away quite a few patients from our program due to lack of interpreter, we are trying to get our major insurance carriers/managed care plan, to pay for an interpreter for their patients to participate in our services/program. We don't have a budget to pay for the cost of interpreters ourselves and if that needs to be changed we would need at least 1-2 years notice probably to change our state budget :/

The insurance plan told me that usually if one of their patients wants to take a "community health education class" that the plan would cover an interpreter for them to attend that class. We have been in negotiations with the health plan for over 4 months now. They are asking us why our optional program is *required* to provide interpreter services. I'm waiting for my boss to reply to them.

Any advice would be appreciated! Especially from any nurse home visiting programs. Thank you!!!