{"id":3887,"date":"2014-03-16T22:05:24","date_gmt":"2014-03-16T11:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/?p=3887"},"modified":"2015-04-29T11:54:18","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T01:54:18","slug":"supporting-non-english-speaking-families","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/supporting-non-english-speaking-families\/","title":{"rendered":"Supporting non-English speaking families"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Interpreters\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) the\u00a0Interpreter Services Department<\/a>\u00a0team provide an all hours service to patients and families of non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB).\u00a0The interpreting services are in place to ensure the same quality of service is afforded to NESB families as to all other patients and their families.<\/p>\n

The service was established in 1971 and was run by the first full time employed interpreter,\u00a0Mr Silvio Proy, who was in charge of the service right through until 2006 when current director Najat Maroki took over. Mr Proy alone covered Turkish, Greek, Italian, Spanish and French languages.<\/p>\n

Prior to the service being offered the medical and nursing staff had to rely on multi-lingual staff members or volunteers, whoever was available at the time to do the interpreting task, even taxi drivers were known to help out!<\/p>\n

At the time medical staff were becoming aware that the need for interpreters was increasing and more importantly the quality of the existing interpreting being offered needed great improvement. A senior medical staff then recommended to the Hospital Medical Board that at least a full time interpreter should be employed in the hospital to cover the languages in demand, and so the RCH Interpreter Service was established.<\/p>\n

In 1982, the RCH Interpreter Service became a separate department and 1994 it was placed under the Medical Administration to provide interpreter services to all RCH departments who required language assistance.<\/p>\n

Today, the team of interpreters at the RCH cover 11 different languages –\u00a0Vietnamese, Arabic, Cantonese, Turkish, Mandarin, Somali, Assyrian, Chaldean, Italian, Tigrinya and Teo-chew and can facilitate requests for other languages.<\/p>\n

On average the interpreters support around 50 inpatients and 400 outpatients per week.<\/p>\n

The team say what they enjoy most is being able to help families understand the condition of their child with the medical terminology explained by medical staff in their own language.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to help families feel at ease when they have conveyed the symptoms of an illness to clinicians to help with the diagnosis and treatment plan for their child,\u201d said Interpreter Services Director, Najat Maroki.<\/p>\n

\u201cTaking a sick child to hospital for the first time can be stressful and it can be even more traumatising for non-English speaking parents. The RCH Interpreter Services team feel privileged when they are able to reduce the fear and isolation caused by the language barrier.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result, families from a non-English speaking background\u00a0feel less anxious and therefore participate better in the course of treatment for their child,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Families wishing to access Interpreter Services at the RCH can either ask their local GP to request an interpreter on their referral letter or ask an RCH staff member for an interpreter when they arrive at the\u00a0Emergency Department<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Specialist Clinics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For more information view the RCH Interpreter Services\u00a0brochure<\/a>\u00a0or visit the\u00a0website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The RCH Interpreter Services Department team provide an all hours service to patients and families of non-English speaking backgrounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3887"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4026,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887\/revisions\/4026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}