Global migration continues to increase, and with it comes increasing linguistic diversity. This presents obvious challenges for both healthcare provider and patient, and the chapters in this volume represent a range of international perspectives on language barriers in health care. A variety of factors influence the best ways of approaching and overcoming these language barriers, including cultural, geographical, political and practical considerations, and as a result a range of approaches and solutions are suggested and discussed. The authors in this volume discuss a wide range of countries and languages, and cover issues that will be familiar to all healthcare practitioners, including the role of informal interpreters, interpreting in a clinical setting, bilingual healthcare practitioners and working with languages with comparatively small numbers of speakers.

This edited volume demonstrates the fundamental role translation and interpreting play in multilingual crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited language proficiency of the main language(s) in which information is disseminated exposed people to additional risks, and the contributors analyse risk communication plans and strategies used throughout the world to communicate measures through translation and interpreting. They show that a political willingness to understand the role of language in public health could lead local and national measures to success, sampling approaches from across four continents. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of healthcare translation and interpreting, sociolinguistics and crisis communication, as well as practitioners of risk and crisis communication and professional translators and interpreters.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) administers two programs that provide benefits based on disability: the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This report analyzes health care utilizations as they relate to impairment severity and SSA's definition of disability. Health Care Utilization as a Proxy in Disability Determination identifies types of utilizations that might be good proxies for "listing-level" severity; that is, what represents an impairment, or combination of impairments, that are severe enough to prevent a person from doing any gainful activity, regardless of age, education, or work experience.

Winner of the NCA Health Communication 2021 Distinguished Book Award. This book examines interpreter-mediated medical encounters and focuses primarily on the phenomenon of bilingual health care. It highlights the interactive and coordinated nature of interpreter-mediated interactions. Elaine Hsieh has put together over 15 hours of interpreter-mediated medical encounters, interview data with 26 interpreters from 17 different cultures/languages, 39 health care providers from 5 clinical specialties, and surveys of 293 providers from 5 clinical specialties. The depth and richness of the data allows for the presentation of a theoretical framework that is not restricted by language combination or clinical contexts. This will be the first book of its kind that includes not only interpreters’ perspectives but also the needs and perspectives of providers from various clinical specialties. Bilingual Health Communication presents an opportunity to lay out a new theoretical framework related to bilingual health care and connects the latest findings from multiple disciplines. This volume presents future research directions that promise development for both theory and practice in the field.

The importance of quality interpreting in legal and healthcare settings can never be stressed enough, when any mistake – no matter how small – can compromise the delivery of justice or put someone’s health at risk. This book addresses issues arising from interpreting in legal and healthcare settings by presenting cutting-edge research findings in interpreting and interpreter education in a number of countries around the world – including those which are relatively new to the field. It contains selected papers from a conference dedicated to such themes – the First International Conference on Legal and Healthcare Interpreting – as well as other invited papers related to the fields of legal and healthcare interpreting. This book is useful not only to scholars and educators, interpreters and translators working in legal or healthcare settings, but also to legal and healthcare professionals who work with interpreters in their day-to-day work, including judges, lawyers, police officers, doctors, midwives and nurses.

This volume is the first to address multilingual healthcare communication around the globe and focuses on institutional, social and linguistic challenges and resources of the healthcare industry. It comprises studies from Canada, Australia, South Africa, Greenland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, and aims to introduce new paths of communicative and methodological agendas, casting a critical view on current linguistic practices in healthcare, nursing and medical interactions. With increased personal mobility in a global society, the need for multilingual staff is on the rise in medical institutions and healthcare organisations, and communicative competencies and practices involving different languages pose challenges for medical doctors, healthcare staff and patients alike. Many studies have highlighted the crucial role played by interpreters and interpreting staff, but the diversity of language situations in different countries requires very different approaches and solutions. Additionally, it may not be possible to develop a single agenda of language services for different medical areas with different needs for counselling, with various forms of treatment that require explanation and the patient‘s informed consent and with varying approaches to the relationship between medical professionals and patients. How to best organise medical (digital) language services in countries as different as South Africa, Greenland, Germany, Belgium and Australia calls for a diversity of possible solutions. The current volume makes a variety of such solutions and practices available for medical staff and healthcare institutions faced with international patients and working with international medical staff. It makes the challenges palpable on an international scale in a way that comparisons may be drawn between different solutions as well as their socio-cultural and institutional implications. This volume is intended for policy makers, medical and healthcare practitioners, institutions, interpreters, teachers and students in professional multilingual healthcare.