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New Course Aims to Break Down Language Barriers Between Patients and Doctors

Onondaga

Community College is partnering with a medical interpreting firm to offer a course aimed at more thoroughly training interpreters who help non-english speakers communicate with their doctors.  The need for interpreters has grown as  Central New York becomes home to more refugees who speak many different languages. 

Multi-cultural Association of Medical Interpreters  Executive Director Cornelia Brown says the 135-hour course gives future interpreters the extensive training they need to ensure doctors and nurses understand the needs of the patient.

“The research shows errors made, and the number of errors, particularly errors that have a medically significant consequence. And there are a lot of people out there interpreting who have no training or not very much training and one reason is there is not too much understanding about the difficulty about of being accurate as an interpreter and all the training that it involves.”

The course begins September 14th and will run through December 22nd.  For more information, email MAMI interpreters at mamiinterpreters.org.

Scott Willis covers politics, local government, transportation, and arts and culture for WAER. He came to Syracuse from Detroit in 2001, where he began his career in radio as an intern and freelance reporter. Scott is honored and privileged to bring the day’s news and in-depth feature reporting to WAER’s dedicated and generous listeners. You can find him on twitter @swillisWAER and email him at srwillis@syr.edu.