The lack of interpreters in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital’s emergency room caused a “delay of nine hours to attend my husband, who later died,” Maria Rodriguez said yesterday. Rodriguez, a Dominican resident of Washington Heights, said she arrived at the hospital around dawn with her husband in July 1999, but could not find a translator. The hospital is located in an area were there are thousands of Dominicans.

“Thousands are affected and it is a secret of hundreds of children who miss school because they need to go to the hospital to interpret for their parents,” said community activist Ydanis Rodriguez, accompanied by Working Families Party (WFP) members and area residents, at a protest in front of the hospital’s emergency room. “The medical center receives millions of dollars in federal funding and, due to the large population of Hispanics in the area, they have the obligation of contracting professionals who can interpret from Spanish to English,” Rogriguez said.

Leonor Torres, an activist from the WFP’s Washington Heights Club, qualified the failure as discrimination, “because federal and state laws require all hospitals to provide interpreters and here they are not,” she said.

In May and June of 2002, activists from the WFP surveyed the emergency room, and found that 72 percent of Spanish-only speakers they interviewed had not received interpretation services. Hospital administrators will meet with activists this Friday.