Access to Language Interpretation Services and its Impact on Clinical and Patient Outcomes

The territory was the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. [...] We chose language interpretation services compared to other interventions to address language accessibility because of the formalized nature of the intervention as well as to provide relevancy to similar interventions within the Canadian context.31 Systematic reviews that have examined the efficacy of language interpretation services have focused on specific settings such as in psychiatric service [...] ESP (English Speaking Patients) Patients comfortable speaking English/choose to speak English in health care settings Length of Stay Time spent in the hospital or in health care settings from intake to discharge Length of Appointment Time spent during an appointment with a health care provider from the beginning to the end of the appointment Clinical Outcomes For the purposes of this scoping revie [...] The use of trained interpreters was associated with lower rates of readmissions,56 fewer errors of clinical significance,42 and produced more favorable outcomes for uptake of preventive services.35 While access to language interpretation appears to be beneficial with respect to clinical outcomes and patient outcomes, it is not possible to definitively conclude which mode of interpretation is most [...] In our scoping review, we found evidence suggesting that the frequency of interpreted health care encounters as well as the consistency of access to language interpretation services seem to be a contributing factor to clinical and patient outcomes.37 More research is required to better establish the relationship between frequency of interpretation services and patient outcomes.