Gonna keep things vague here but it's interesting!

Kid arrives as an international patient to our ED

Coming from a specific middle eastern country from a specific embassy there (so someone with a lot of pull)

Doctor has to take photos of an intimate area, uploads them to the medical record

in a file where anyone with access to that can see (not just clinical staff, but admin staff like me, and more importantly, the embassy???)

IDK why the embassy has the file but it was part of their requirements

Anyway I got a safety event notice this morning because it caused significant embarrassment for the family

(why is there not a place you can upload photos just so the clinical staff can see it??? or if there is, DO THAT, DOC)

yikes, that should not be in a place where it's visible to non-clinical staff

RIGHT??

I'm so mortified for that poor kid

And then ANOTHER Haitian Creole family comes in where nobody speaks their language. I swear we have 240 translators on staff and this is the one significant gap.

oh noooo. I feel like Haitian Creole should NOT be a gap here. like, less speakers in Boston than in some parts of the country, but still

yeahhhhh

We have French trinidanian creole but it's not the same by far

<- eyy learn something new here

oh, that's a fascinating language branch

thanks for sharing the diagram

no problem! I was curious too

I should ping my friend Jess, she studies endangered languages for a living.

(Haitian Creole is not one of them but a lot of the smaller branches are)

Me sitting here wondering if my friend could translate in this situation... she knows a lot of languages... not that it would help probably given she’s in Kentucky but lmao languages and Tessa are tangled in my brain

Honestly most of our translators aren't on site - we have the standing computer screns

*screens

But I think you have to be specially trained because there's a big difference in translating hospital things - anywhere from "take 5 milligrams of this daily" to "you have this disease and these are your options"

Lots of horrifying incidents my boss brought up because of those reasons .-.

That’s very fair. Oof. I can only imagine

Yeah conversational fluency and that sort of technical/professional language is very different.

Yeah, Em took medical Spanish in college b/c there are A Lot of technical things that even native speakers don't necessarily know, and she knew she wanted to go into some kind of clinical setting in an area with a LOT of Spanish speakers

Oh no, poor kid!

Boston has a proportionally high Haitian population, hospitals getting a Haitian Creole translator on staff should be a priority

yep