Need and acceptance of medical laypersons as interpreters in doctor-patient-communication

• Autores: Niels-Jens Albrecht, Stefan Nickel
• Localización: The language of health care: proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Language and Health Care. Alicante, 24th, 25th and 26th October 2007 / coord. por Miguel Ángel Campos Pardillos, Adelina Gómez González-Jover, 2008, ISBN 978-84-691-2836-7, pág. 2
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The contribution is based upon studies conducted in Northrhine-Westfalia (NRW), Berlin and Hamburg in 2006 and 2007. Their common topic was the communication between health service personnel and foreign language patients.

    About 8.9 million foreigners and about 6.5 million first-generation migrants live in Germany (Microzensus 2005). Their German language competence has not yet been sufficiently investigated. Neither are there reliable data about migrants of the second and third generation and their German language competency (Borde, 2005). A study conducted in 36 hospitals in Berlin documents considerable deficiencies regarding communication (Deininger, 2007).

    Many hospitals in Berlin and Northrhine-Westfalia meet these communicational gaps by resorting to bilingual members of their own staff. In Hamburg, these needs are met by a system of external freelance interpreters with about 9,000 missions reported so far (Albrecht, 2002). In the framework of a secondary analysis, a quantitative analysis of the data was performed. The analysis strategy was designed to investigate the results of the total population within a defined period of time, which allowed to perform a trend analysis. It was thus possible to perform a subgroup analysis according to individual characteristics (Albrecht and Nickel, 2003). The procedure was backed up by qualitative data collection involving participating doctors and interpreters (Allaoui, 2005).

    Studies from Berlin and Hamburg (Uebelacker, 2007; Albrecht, 2002) provide information on the health professionals’ satisfaction with the interpreters’ performances; the results are partly congruent with the results published by Pöchhacker in 1998. The pretest of a study within the EU-EQUAL project TransKom finds positive results above average for interpreters trained during 2.5 years (Nickel and Albrecht, 2007).

    To summarise, the results of these projects and studies show that, on the one hand, the German health economic system still finds it difficult to provide funds for qualified language mediation between physician and patient. On the other hand, various fields of social medicine state a definite need, in particular in the area of children, adolescents and family counselling. This resulted a.o. in a project, sponsored by the Federal Labour Ministry, with the objective to establish German-wide the profession of a language and culture mediator (Morales, 2007).