Who is talking and what are they saying? Ethical considerations when interpreting for others in healthcare

Abstract: Appropriate healthcare requires good communication between patients and clinicians. Effective communication is challenging when clinicians and patients do not share a common language, including mismatches in spoken language, or when one party is nonverbal, deaf, hard of hearing, or non-signing. Healthcare interpreters, ideally trained in language, cultural traditions, interpersonal communication, and medical vocabulary, can be instrumental in facilitating communication. Limited attention has been paid to the ethical issues faced by trained healthcare interpreters. In addition to trained healthcare interpreters, clinicians and patients must often rely on “informal interpreters” such as nearby hospital staff, family, friends, or bystanders. This panel will examine ethical issues related to trained and informal interpreting in healthcare, such as patient safety, privacy, confidentiality, and equity and disparities.

The first panelist, trained in biomedical sciences and policy, will describe categories of trained healthcare interpreters and present preliminary results of a systematic literature review identifying ethical issues trained healthcare interpreters face.

The second panelist will explore issues associated with “informal interpreters” and AI-enabled services. This panelist is a bilingual philosopher with informal interpreting experience.

The third panelist, a bioethicist, will present case studies and ethical issues involving interpreters of spoken and sign language. The cases will come from personal essays collected for a bioethics journal.

The fourth panelist is a trained healthcare interpreter who interprets and teaches interpreting skills for a St. Louis-area nonprofit. She will reflect on the skills that healthcare interpreters need and the ethical issues the other panelists described in the context of her work.