Essential To Workers’ Compensation Success Stories: Interpretation Services

Only one type of healthcare professional is part of every conversation patients have while receiving care. It’s not a nurse, not a case manager, certainly not a doctor … Need a hint? It’s someone who acts as the voice for all of the above, as well as for the patient — the interpreter.

For patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP), the entirety of their care is mediated through the voices of interpreters.

In the world of Workers’ Compensation, we call this essential function support, i.e., providing critical, two-way communication that takes place from the time of the injury through recovery.

Traditional understanding of the role of the interpreter emphasizes an ideal of interpreter invisibility (PDF) in these encounters, and this framework of invisibility is part of the reason the work of interpreters often goes unnoticed.

Despite this ideal of invisibility, however, all of us in the healthcare and Workers’ Compensation world would do well to take a closer look at what interpreters do and what that can teach us about establishing therapeutic relationships across linguistic and cultural differences.