Electronic Health Reporter

Guest post by Sean Patrick Hopwood, MBA, president, Day Translations, Inc.

While no one can deny that electronic technology has made giant leaps towards protecting patient information and preventing errors and misuse, you may be surprised to learn that many health care practitioners and facilities are still cutting corners when it comes to medical translations or interpretation.

Inaccurate medical interpreting, or translations carried out incorrectly have the potential to put patients’ lives at risk, and there have been several cases of medical mistranslations documented that have led to severe complications, incorrect diagnosis, and even death.

Check out the following cases that could have had different outcomes had the correctly trained language professionals been used:

1. Willie Ramirez

In 1980, a young baseball player called Willie Ramirez was taken to a hospital in South Florida, in a comatose state. A medical interpreter was called in to translate the family’s explanation of events; however, the interpreter was not familiar with the Cuban Spanish word “intoxicado,” which was translated as intoxicated, and the doctors assumed that Mr. Ramirez had taken a drug overdose.

This is one of the most famous cases in history of inaccuracy in medical interpretation, as what seems like a fairly small error led to the young baseball player waking up as a quadriplegic. How? Well, in Cuban Spanish, the word “intoxicado” means to be sick after ingesting something, which could be a food, drug, liquid, or anything else that could cause a person to be unwell.

When Ramirez’s doctors dismissed his case as an overdose, they failed to consider other possibilities and overlooked the fact that the patient was actually experiencing bleeding in the brain. By the time the mistake was detected and the proper course of treatment initiated, it was too late. The damage had been done and no amount of neurosurgery could reverse Ramirez’s quadriplegia.

2. Maria Guevara

If ever there were a more heart-wrenching tale than that of Ms. Guevara’s, it would be hard to imagine, and this tragic example of a medical facility’s negligence has been hotly disputed over the last couple of years. Because of the absence of a medical interpreter, Ms. Guevara was accidentally given a prescription to induce abortion after apparently replying “yes”, to a question she did not understand.

While the doctor was asking her if she wanted to abort the baby, Maria thought the question was whether she wanted to keep the baby, and with no professional medical interpreter to translate between herself and the doctor, the outcome was losing the baby in a Californian hospital where almost half of all patients are Spanish speakers with English as their second language.

Occurring in 2013, the case of Guevara has forced the medical profession to come to terms with the real risk involved in inaccurate or total absence of professional linguists on hand to avoid liable and save lives; especially with the Hispanic population set to outnumber white Caucasians by 2060.

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