Emergency VR Interpreter Confidence.....

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Permalink Reply by Cheryl Bauer on January 2, 2010 at 9:18am

I feel confident and have provided many years of medical interpreting in the community as well as emergency room medical interpreting. However, recently I was the "team" on an emergency call on video relay. It was a very AKWARD situation and after the call ended I was left feeling very frustrated. From my understanding all 911 dispatchers are required to follow a certain "protocol" when assessing the nature of the emergency when receiving a 911 call. If the emergency is medical in nature they ask very specific questions in a certain order. The dispatcher will not give you the next step in your instructions until they recieve a response from the prior question. The video phone was located in the living room. A man was found unconcious in the shower and the other 3 people in the apartment were Deaf. While the 911 dispatcher was giving step by step instructions making sure each step was completed VALUABLE time was lost. It was VERY obvious to me the dispatcher did not understand the concept of a video phone and what the interpreter was doing. The dispatcher wanted the Deaf person to bring the video phone into the bathroom so that CPR could be preformed. Finally, the interpreter had the person on the video phone turn around and sign the instructions to another deaf person standing by the bathroom door, who in turn signed it to the person performing CPR in the bathroom. The message had to be translated FOUR TIMES, as well as the responses. I believe we handled the situation the best we could with what we had to work with but it still didn't make me feel any better when the call was disconnected.

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Permalink Reply by Risa O on January 2, 2010 at 9:53am

Some people just don't know how to do their job, and right or wrong, we end up doing their job for them. In another circumstance, such as a call to customer service, I believe in interpreting more faithfully so that the sign language caller can realize that they have a subpar hearing representative on the other line without the interpreter interfering and cleaning it up for them. On the other hand, figuring out the best way for everyone to communicate (sometimes setting up a "communication chain" is the only way) can still be seen as within the realm of communicating, and therefore part of our responsibility. Also, when it's an absolute emergency, like you, I do what works. In fact, to an extent, you'd do that with any call. Expecting the dispatcher to understand our equipment and the visual nature of Deaf people and that it's not a cordless phone and all the other things that we already understand may not be possible in a life or death emergency situation. Sometimes, we're not just a dial tone. (Am I allowed to say that?) This was an emergency, there was really no time to educate the dispatcher on how this would work best through a visual medium, and you did the best you could.

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Permalink Reply by Cheryl Bauer on May 13, 2010 at 3:35pm

I was the back up interpreter assisting on the 911 call and after the dispatcher asked the deaf person to bring the video phone in to the bathroom, I hit the toggle switch so I could explain to the 911 dispatcher verbally what was happening visually and explain that moving the phone was not an option. During that time the "on call" interpreter was working with the deaf consumers to get the message across. Like you said, we did the best we could with what we had but it was still none the less frustrating.

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