Ethics Workshop by Cynthia Roat:
Making the Tough Decisions: Ethical Decision-making for Healthcare Interpreters
Limited to 30 attendees
This 5-hour workshop is part of OSTI's 2020 Virtual Conference. To be eligible for attending this workshop, you must have already registered for the conference.
Bio
Cynthia E. Roat is an interpreter trainer and international consultant on language access in health care and patient navigation. A native of upstate New York, she spent a decade working in rural areas of Latin America before moving to Seattle to earn her master’s degree in International Public Health from the University of Washington. Ms. Roat entered the interpreting world in 1992 and quickly became certified by Washington State as a medical and social-service Spanish-English interpreter. Her interest in systems change, however, led her to teach interpreters, trainers and medical providers the basics of interpreting practice and to consult with healthcare administrators around the country on how to improve their language access programs. Most recently, Ms. Roat spent three years at Seattle Children’s Hospital, managing their unique Bilingual Patient Navigator program, before returning to her national consulting work.
Over the past two decades, Ms. Roat has made significant contributions, both in the U.S. and abroad, in many areas of language access. She is the author of a wide array of key resources in the field and the primary developer of the original version of Bridging the Gap, for many years the country’s most widely offered training for health care interpreters. Her most recent book, Healthcare Interpreting in Small Bites, is being adopted as an ancillary text in many interpreter training programs.
Ms. Roat has consulted for a variety of large medical centers and healthcare systems. Always concerned about building grassroots capacity, Ms. Roat has been a mentor to interpreters, trainers and Language Access Coordinators around the U.S. She is a founding member of the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC), where she currently serves as Treasurer; she is also a founding member of the Washington State Coalition on Language Access (WASCLA), and a former board member of the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society (NOTIS), where she currently organizes regular interpreter training workshops through the Medical Special Interest Group. She is known nationally as an engaging speaker, a knowledgeable resource, and an energetic advocate for language access in general.
Session Abstract
The world of the healthcare interpreter is fraught with difficult ethical dilemmas and the need for making in-the-moment decisions. For example, if a patient asks that certain information not be interpreted, do you keep it confidential even if the non-disclosure may harm the patient? Do you interpret everything accurately even when the message could impact or destroy the patient-provider relationship? Do you withdraw from a medical encounter that is too complicated for you when that means the patient will get no interpreter at all? How is an interpreter to decide?
This four-hour interactive webshop will introduce healthcare interpreters to a process for thinking about these difficult situations and for quickly making ethical decisions about what to do.
The class will begin with a quick review and comparison of two Codes of Ethics: the National Code of Ethics for Interpreters in Health Care and DSHS’s Interpreter, Translator, and Licensed Agency Personnel Code of Professional Conduct.
Participants will then learn the ethical decision-making model included in the California Healthcare Interpreting Association’s Standards of Practice. Concrete examples will be used to show how to apply the model to real-life situations.
Finally, participants will break up into small groups to consider specific ethical dilemmas. Groups will apply the CHIA model and come up with one or several acceptable responses to the dilemma. These will then be shared with the larger group for consideration and further discussion.