AHRQ Patient Safety Network: Hospitals often ignore policies on using qualified medical interpreters.

AHRQ Patient Safety Network





Hospitals often ignore policies on using qualified medical interpreters.

Rice S. Modern Healthc. August 30, 2014.

Language barriers can lead to misunderstandings that increase risks of error. This magazine article highlights the frequent reliance on families, friends, and other nonprofessionals as translators in medical settings and discusses how lack of standards and insufficient reporting of errors related to interpreters, along with challengesto implementing programs, hinder progress in improving communication with non-English speaking patients.

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