These days, it seems like magazines and newspapers are being inundated with reports that suggest negligence in the medical care. With greater attention being given to medical negligence, it is reasonable that citizens across the country doubt that everything that can be done to prevent so many unnecessary patient injuries is already being done. Instead, people are concluding that most instances of malpractice can be easily prevented through new workplace training, policies, and procedures. However, the search for reasonable, acceptable, and more effective remedies and countermeasures continues with ever-greater vigor. Despite all of the new safety mechanisms, medical mistakes are still made each day that could have been prevented. A frequent cause of medical oversight stems from poorly trained medical translation workers which prevent effective dialogue between the patient and the doctor. It is through writings like these that we hope to educate the public on common and costly errors made in the medicinal and therapeutic service sectors in order to provide safer treatment.
The lack of quality Medical Translation personnel has become the next global epidemic. In fact, the continued increase has even led to the need for more
Legal Translation workers. But in most cases the hospitals simply had no access to the Spanish, Arabic, English, and French Translation services that were needed. With the goal of providing a simple and intuitive explanation of the challenges faced in the healthcare field, a group of nurses and doctors have summarized the results of a study that connect problems in medical translation to fatal mistakes.
Textbooks on workplace communication detail the encoding, transmission and decoding that takes place in all forms of workplace. Each message is designed to produce some sort of stimuli when interpreted by the intended party. The messages may be conveyed by voice, in print, by displays, by nonverbal gestures, or by silence when messages could be given. What we are trying to get across is that the transmission process can be direct or roundabout and it can take the form of an electronic message, facial expression, smoke signal or telephone call. Any message can also be transmitted in a wide range of tones that might be humorous, sad, supportive, vindictive and threatening to name a few. Further, they might even be written in a strange script or foreign language. It may be a fuzzy ambiguous message intended to avoid accountability or a pure spin to avoid responsibility.
Here is some information from an actual healthcare report that documents what happens when medical translation is poor and the human communication process breaks down. A worldwide report written by a major medical association found large instances of
Medical Translation error in the medical systems of the U.S., Canada and several European Union nations. Patients reported serious health error rates of 9% to 18%. Poor medical translation accuracy prevented effective and reliable communication between the doctor and patient. This included not following doctor's advice because
German Translation workers lacked the skills needed to converse adequately in native languages of patients. As a result, many patients found it too difficult to understand the instructions that the physician had given or because the patient did not agree with something that the translator said. Instead of receiving adequate care, patients left a doctor's office without getting important questions answered. Often, doctors were unable not make clear the specific goals for treatment. In many instances, medical interpreters ignored giving the patient important details about pharmaceutical side effects and side effects of the condition. As a result, those who suffered from side effects just stopped taking their medications. In terms of communications that deal with care coordination, the patients were sent for duplicate tests by different health professionals, they had to repeat their health history to multiple health professionals, their medical records did not reach their doctor's offices in time for their appointment, and they received conflicting information from different health professionals.
