During health care encounters with patients from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, there is always a concern about information getting lost in translation between health care providers and their patients. Language and cultural concordance significantly affect the quality and effectiveness of health care delivery. Although phone-in interpreters, with or without video capabilities, are accessible online, none can match in-person interpretation. Even if high-profile political conversations have adapted to artificially intelligent interpretation, forgoing in-person human interpreters, health care delivery may still warrant their use. This is especially true if such individuals are available and accessible round-the-clock to meet the diverse needs of both patients and providers.
Considering soaring health care costs, which may make cost-prohibitive in-person interpretation unfeasible, it may be worthwhile to explore training a diverse population of multilingual pre-medical students and graduates in this area. They could then serve as interns, professionally facilitating in-person interpretation among diverse patient-provider populations. Even if such internships (potentially termed language “doulas,” drawing inspiration from doulas) were unpaid or underpaid, they could become a great avenue for pre-medical students and graduates seeking firsthand health care experience before applying to medical schools. Moreover, trained pre-medical students and graduates volunteering as language “doulas” could cost-effectively bridge gaps in health care delivery.
As with any new approach, there would be pros and cons to having language “doulas” in health care settings. Their role would be to professionally accompany patients, helping to keep health care encounters as linguistically and culturally personal as possible without losing the professional ethos of effective delivery. For post-modern patients, moving away from artificially intelligent virtual interpreters may seem difficult, as modern living may have caused humans to lose their touch with the nuance and value of in-person communication. However, with time, they might re-acquire a taste for in-person communication and learn to relish it once again, especially during linguistically-culturally concordant interpretations.
From the perspective of pre-medical students and graduates, interning as language “doulas” would allow these trained volunteers to observe firsthand what diverse patients undergo, feel, and need. Such enriching experiences would serve them well when they matriculate as medical students and eventually practice as empathic doctors. Even as volunteers, these pre-medical students and graduates would have to be well-trained according to pre-defined standards before they could intern. Their linguistic-cultural training curricula could be inspired by the training for doulas, who provide professional accompaniment for patients and families during perinatal and peripartum services.
Essentially, this vital avenue of language “doulas” accompanying patients to facilitate linguistically-culturally concordant health care should not be relegated to an unrealized future but embraced in the rapidly passing present. This is especially true to ensure and enhance health care delivery in multicultural, multilinguistic societies composed of diverse populations.
Deepak Gupta is an anesthesiologist. Kaya Chakrabortty is a graduate student. Yara Ismaeil is an undergraduate student.
