Language barriers can be particularly detrimental in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), where families face challenging, often life-changing medical decisions. In many hospitals, the decision about when to use interpretation services is made by a member of the health care team, not the family. In the first study to examine the impact of providing families direct access to interpreter technology, researchers at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago found that communication time with the medical team doubled among families who spoke a language other than English. The results were published in the journal Hospital Pediatrics.
We have designed a simple, low-cost intervention that empowers families by allowing them to access interpreters early on.”
Mary Pilarz, MD, lead author, critical care physician at Lurie Children’s and assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
“We were surprised by how much communication with physicians increased,” he said. “This is exciting, because we know from previous research that professional interpreting improves outcomes, but is underutilized. Our aim was to increase interpreter use and hopefully achieve better partnerships with non-English speaking families of children in intensive care.”
As part of the study intervention, families were encouraged to initiate interpretation independently using tablets provided by the hospital. Each patient room had a video interpreter tablet with instructions in the family’s primary language.
The study included 158 families in the pre-intervention group and 271 families in the post-intervention group. By analyzing billing data, researchers found that the average duration of interpreter use per patient per day increased from 7 to 16 minutes.
