Babel: A study of languages in the emergency department

Language concordance is detrimental in the emergency departments, because in certain situations, a case could be a matter of life or death. The goal of this research is to gain an understanding of the linguistic needs of the patients. Suburban hospitals face a language barrier due to the diversity of people requiring services. People enter daily who do not speak English as their first language. Interpreters are sometimes available for non-native English speakers. The tremendous rise in the immigrant population leads to a higher demand of variety and availability of interpreters to ensure that the needs of the patients who can’t speak English are fulfilled. There is a total of fourty-four diverse languages spoken in the emergency department. What is the solution to the problem of needing more interpreters? What about solving the problem of the variety of languages spoken? Ginny Lee, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill department of emergency medicine, said the following: “the goal when searching for employees who are going to be interpreters is to find more people who are fluent in various languages rather than just in one”.