Study: City Hospitals Lack Translators

Inadequate translation services at New York hospitals bar many non-English speakers from health care, according to a study by the City Comptroller released Monday.
"Our hospitals are trapped in an English-only time warp," said Comptroller William Thompson, Jr. at a press conference held Monday at the New York Immigration Coalitions offices. According to Thompson and immigrant organizations, many New York hospitals are not meeting legal requirements to provide "meaningful access to their facilities and programs."
The study assigned Spanish-speaking testers to make phone calls and visit hospitals in areas with large Spanish-speaking communities. Close to a quarter of New Yorkers speak Spanish as their first language.
Nearly 75 percent of hospitals in the study performed poorly in at least one of the areas tested. A third of the hospitals tested had no one available who could communicate with Spanish-speakers seeking to make appointments, and over 40 percent of billing offices had no Spanish-speakers to respond to phone calls.
"Hospitals should not discriminate against people with limited English," said Nora Chavez, health coordinator of the Latin American Integration Center in Woodside. Chavez, who advocates for immigrants in need of medical care, said most of her cases involve immigrants who cant access care because of language barriers.
One of Chavezs clients is Martha Pea, 25, an immigrant from Mexico City who lives in Sunnyside and has a five-year-old son with severe asthma. On repeated visits to Elmhurst Hospital Center of Queens with her son, Pea said staff treated her rudely and refused to speak Spanish or find a translator to help her.
When she finally met with a doctor, there was no regular translator available except for a janitor, so she brought her 17-year-old son-in-law to translate, forcing him to miss school.
Elmhurst Hospital is one of the few hospitals in the city that has recently implemented a translation training program to prepare their staff to communicate with the diverse immigrant community that uses their facilities.
Last fall, the program began training 80 staff members to provide translation in Spanish, Haitian-Creole, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Urdu, Hendi and Bengali as either full-time or part-time interpreters.
Public hospitals did better at providing translation services than private hospitals, according to the study. St. Johns Medical Center in Queens was ranked as the worst citywide by the study, while other Queens hospitals performance varied.
The studys sponsors said hospital administrators and city and state government should take responsibility for putting more trained, bilingual staff in New York hospitals.
"We need to do all we can, not only to help them get in the hospital door, but to get them the health care they need," said Thompson.
sarah@queenscourier.com