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Bilingual Interpreter Services: Models Programs
Community Health Centers
Community Health Services Program, Seattle, WA
Community Health Services Program (CHS), serves a group of community
health centers in the greater Seattle area. Its sponsoring agency is the
Center for MultiCultural Health, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Overview:
CHS has four multilingual family health workers who rotate through six community
clinics in Seattle/King County. The family health workers provide interpretation,
advocacy, and patient education services at the clinic sites.
Description of the model:
Begun in 1980 as the Indochinese Language Bank, CHS was created by Central
Seattle Community Health Centers (now Center for MultiCultural Health) and
Puget Sound Neighborhood Health Centers in response to the tremendous increase
in the number of Southeast Asian refugees entering Seattle-King County.
The goal then, as now, was to increase access to community health center
services for individuals with limited English proficiency.
This program utilizes a shared service approach. The pool of four full-time,
salaried family health workers, who together speak eight Southeast Asian
languages, rotate through the clinics on a regular weekly schedule depending
on a clinic's need for a specific language. Over the years, as the
language needs of the clinics have diversified, the program has added on-call,
contract interpreters who cover over 30 languages and are pre-scheduled
as needed through the central office of CHS' sister program, Community
Interpretation Services.
Interpreters are screened and assessed for language skills and knowledge
of medical terminology before hire, and then receive at least 12 hours of
basic classroom training in the role of interpreters, the ethics of interpreting,
and how to interpret. On-the-job training is also provided by pairing new
interpreters with more experienced counterparts in a mentoring relationship.
A grant from the Northwest Area Foundation was the program's primary
support for the first three years. Since then, CHS has received continual
support from the Seattle-King County Department of Public Health, as well
as grants from other private and public sources. In addition, for the past
four years, the program has been able to recover a portion of its costs
through fee-for-service reimbursement from the state's Medical Assistance
Administration, Department of Social and Health Services, for interpreting
services provided to Medicaid patients.
Intended audience/client base:
Clients of community health centers are the recipients of this service.
Unique characteristics:
The family health workers are an integral part of the clinic health care
team, playing an expanded role than goes beyond interpreting, although interpretation
lays the foundation for the work they do. They work in partnership with
providers to offer comprehensive, culturally and linguistically appropriate
care to patients, and are called upon to do health education, outreach,
and provider education in the culture of their patients. The on-call interpreters,
on the other hand, often do not have a continuing relationship with the
clinics and patients, are not trained in the expanded role, and restrict
their interactions to the actual interpreted encounter between provider
and patient.
Contact information:
Shelley Cooper-Ashford, Executive Director, Center for Multicultural Health,
105 14th Avenue, Suite 2C, Seattle, WA 98122. Phone: 206-461-6910. Fax:
206-461-4890. E-mail: shelleyc@cschc.org
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