For 52-year-old Lydia K., it was a nightmare that could have ended in tragedy. When her mother Cecilia K. suddenly fell ill and developed a high temperature, Lydia called 911. She had only lived in the US for four years and did not speak English that well, but she still understood the paramedics when they told her that her mother had to be hospitalized right away.

They were taken to Methodist Hospital, where a surgeon determined that Cecilia needed dangerous emergency surgery. Lydia understood this as well, but it was beyond her linguistic capabilities to understand what the diagnosis was, why the surgery had to be done right away, and why she had to sign papers giving permission to operate on her elderly mother. And this meant that the document she signed allowing the operation was not valid.

Unfortunately, there were no Russian-speaking medical workers on duty who could have explained the situation to Lydia. Both she and hospital staff members were frantically searching for an interpreter. Finally, Lydia's nephew arrived two hours later, within the critical time period designated by the doctor. But her mother’s condition worsened, and the operation had to be done under more complicated conditions.

This is not a new topic: interpreters are needed at medical institutions, where mutual understanding between doctors and patients is key to health and can sometimes be a matter of life and death. The New York Immigration Coalition particularly emphasizes this fact in its research on the interaction between the city’s hospitals and its two million residents who speak English poorly (this is the Coalition’s count). The report’s authors stress that patients who do not speak English cannot describe their symptoms to a doctor, understand their diagnosis, or make sense of their insurance. The researchers uncovered more than a few cases where this language barrier resulted in incorrect diagnoses and erroneous amputations, abortions, sterilizations, etc.

The authors are categorically against relatives, friends, or other patients serving as interpreters for two reasons. First of all, interpreting mistakes can be made for which no one can be held responsible. Second of all, doing this breaks doctor patient confidentiality. Imagine that a patient’s son takes on the role of interpreter and finds out that his parent has cancer...

“It is absolutely impossible to provide quality care if the patient cannot describe his symptoms clearly or understand his diagnosis or the procedures that he will undergo," said Andrew Friedman, co-director of Make the Road New York and a participant in the Now We're Talking study, which took place between October 2007 and February 2008. Human rights advocates surveyed over 600 mostly Spanish- and Korean-speaking patients who did not know any English. It turned out that 79 percent had had the chance to converse with medical personnel through an interpreter. This marks enormous progress in comparison with 2006, when only 29 percent of patients were able to receive this service. This progress was achieved thanks to the introduction of new rules requiring both city and private hospitals to provide experienced interpreters for patients and to make various forms available in different languages. After this policy was put in place, only five percent of patients needed to find their own interpreters, but these cases involved rarer languages.

Claire Pospisil, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Health, said that interpreting services have been under constant monitoring over the past year, which is why only ten of the 10,000 complaints received by the Department about hospitals concerned interpreting.

The Now We’re Talking Study reached pretty much the same conclusion. And this is good news.