The surge in migration is bringing about an increase in racial and cultural diversity in many parts of the world. Take the United States, for example, with its 350 spoken languages. Or Australia, where one-fifth of its citizens speak another language aside from English.
Have we all ever taken a step back to observe how this diversity impacts healthcare delivery? Especially as the global pandemic continues to rage on. It has now become glaring to all that any section left behind can become a threat to every other stakeholder.
The critical question now becomes: How can we improve healthcare delivery for the minorities in a diverse population?
While there are multiple solutions to the question, we want to place our focus on the segment that is relevant to us, which is — through quality translation. And that is what we would be exploring in this post.
How does translation impact healthcare?
We all can agree that communication between all interested parties is a crucial component to quality healthcare delivery, so when dealing with a culturally or linguistically diverse set, it is only natural for a form of language exchange to occur.
In some of these scenarios, translation is required in medical texts — consent forms, patient records, clinical trial records, medical equipment manuals, just to mention a few. While other scenarios may involve interpretation from one language to another to convey information between a patient and their healthcare provider.
All these scenarios put together have the end goal of improving the quality of healthcare to relevant stakeholders.
Whatever the case may be, let us be quick to point out that there is a strict need for a high level of precision in all of these services due to the fact that life-threatening issues can occur if errors are present.
This level of precision does not originate from the ordinary translation or interpretation of the languages involved but from a comprehensive QA process. The entire language exchange process needs to pass through a rigorously designed quality-assurance procedure in order to produce the best results.
Clearly, translation and interpretation services help eliminate language barriers, thus enhancing healthcare inclusion for the linguistic minorities, which goes a long way in improving public safety.
For more information, check out our post on quality assurance in medical translation.
The role of translation technology in healthcare
As we have already established that translation positively impacts the general state of healthcare, it is only logical for technologies associated with translation to do the same.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate this impact is through the way these technologies have helped in navigating the pandemic era. For starters, real-time interpretation services through the phone or virtual set-ups have helped to deliver the same required assistance that one-on-one services provide while at the same time eliminating the risk of participants getting infected.
We all have also witnessed instances where AI and machine learning technologies have assisted in delivering faster translations of global research findings regarding the pandemic.
Telemedicine and other translation technology-related trends are emerging as the new norms in the healthcare space as the world gradually emerges from the effects of the pandemic. And we predict that they will play more significant roles with time.
Wrapping up
The delivery of all-inclusive healthcare is perhaps the quickest way to overcome this global pandemic. And when it comes to catering to the cultural and linguistic minorities of any region, language services providers play a critical role through translation and interpretation services.
Finally, emerging trends show that translation technologies would play significant roles in improving clinical outcomes of patients going forward.