Language barriers can be especially detrimental in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), where families face difficult and often life-changing medical decisions. In many hospitals, members of the medical team, rather than family members, decide when to use interpreter services. In the first study to examine the impact of providing families with direct access to interpretation technology, researchers at Chicago’s Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital found that families who spoke a language other than English doubled the amount of time they spent communicating with their health care team. The results were published in a magazine Hospital Pediatrics.
We designed a simple, low-cost intervention that empowers families by allowing them to begin accessing an interpreter. ”
Mary Pilarz, MD, first author, critical care physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
“I was surprised at how much more communication I had with clinicians,” she said. “This is interesting because previous research has shown that professional interpreting improves outcomes, but it tends to be underutilized. Our aim was to increase the use of interpreters and, if possible, better partnerships with families of non-English speaking children in intensive care.”
As part of the study intervention, families were encouraged to initiate their own interpretation using hospital-provided tablets. Each room was equipped with a video interpretation tablet with instructions in the family’s first language.
The study included 158 families in the pre-intervention group and 271 families in the post-intervention group. When researchers analyzed claims data, they found that the average interpreter time per patient day increased from 7 to 16 minutes.
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Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
