Ideas That Work: A Better Understanding

At our ASC, 15% to 20% of our patients speak Spanish as their primary language. For many years, we've partnered with East Tennessee State University's (ETSU) Language and Culture Resource Center (LCRC), just a few miles away, to arrange as far in advance as we could for interpreters to be here for our Latino patients when they come in. But we felt we should do more, so we asked LCRC to translate all of the papers a patient needs to sign or take home as well. We had 12 sheets in all, and they charged us about $60. It took them about 3 weeks to finish the work. They also helped us put Spanish-language content on our website. To confirm the translations were accurate, we had one of our Latino doctors look them over — it's definitely important to have a second pair of eyes make sure everything reads precisely as it should, especially for healthcare documents. Many ASCs use commercial translation services to do this work, but we felt partnering with ETSU in our own community was the right way to go.