The Southern Medical Journal (SMJ) is the official, peer-reviewed journal of the Southern Medical Association. It has a multidisciplinary and inter-professional focus that covers a broad range of topics relevant to physicians and other healthcare specialists.
SMJ // Article
Original Article
Enhancing Interpreter Utilization among Telephone Schedulers Assisting Patients with Non-English-Language Preference
Abstract
Objectives: Patients with non-English-language preference (NELP) face language barriers that impede effective communication and delivery of high-quality care. Recognizing call centers as pivotal points of contact for patients with NELP, we proposed a quality improvement initiative to evaluate and enhance interpreter utilization among telephone schedulers within a tertiary healthcare system.Methods: Staff interpreters and medical students posing as patients with NELP placed test calls to schedulers to request five non-English languages. Schedulers were surveyed to assess their attitudes toward and confidence levels in accessing and utilizing interpreters. We subsequently informed scheduling leadership of preintervention test call and survey results and recommended areas of improvement. Postintervention test calls and surveys were conducted 3 months later to assess for improvement.
Results: Schedulers’ confidence in their ability to identify a caller in need of interpreter services improved by 9.2% (P = 0.046). The percentage of schedulers who accessed interpreter services in the last year increased by 14.3% (P < 0.001). Schedulers reported long wait times for an interpreter as the most frequently encountered difficulty when attempting to access a telephone interpreter. Test callers identified the telephone tree as the most significant barrier to scheduling.
Conclusions: Our initiative improved schedulers’ confidence in their ability to identify a caller in need of interpreter services, and it increased the percentage of schedulers who accessed interpreter services. Overall interpreter usage among telephone schedulers in this healthcare system remains suboptimal, however, and continuous internal testing and feedback with in-person scheduler education and larger test call sample sizes may facilitate sustained and meaningful improvements. We hope that our study can lay the groundwork for future studies to enhance the scheduling process for linguistically diverse patient populations.
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