The House Health Committee unanimously passed a bill this week toughening standards for sign-language interpreters after deaf advocates complained that Salem Hospital and some Portland-area hospitals were hiring unqualified interpreters to cut costs.
House Bill 2419-A amends the state law regarding the testing, qualifications and certifications of healthcare interpreters to include American Sign Language interpreters alongside the rules for foreign translators.
The law apparently had left out communications for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, leaving Oregon without its own policy for ensuring qualified interpreters.
Philip Wolfe, who sits on the Portland Commission on Disabilities, said bad sign language interpreters had affected him personally when he visited the emergency room of an un-named Portland hospital:
“These interpreters they sent were not qualified because they were cheap,” Wolfe told the House Health Committee earlier this month through an interpreter. “If they had used a different, more expensive agency, they would have had qualified interpreters for the situation I was in, so that was a barrier I experienced personally.”
Healthcare facilities are required under the American Disabilities Act to provide interpretive services for those unable to communicate in spoken English, but the revised law, which the Oregon Health Authority submitted to the Legislature, works to ensure that deaf Oregonians are not forgotten, and that a clear path to qualified sign language interpreters is available.
Now the Oregon Health Authority must approve and certify qualified sign language interpreters to be used whenever possible. No one will be allowed to use the title of “qualified healthcare interpreter” for sign language or otherwise, without the state’s OK. Certification is premised on completing 60 hours of training, including anatomy, physiology and medical interpretation. Interpreters also must pass a written and oral test.
Chad Ludwig, the current president of the Oregon Association of the Deaf, said that Salem Hospital in particular had been guilty of hiring sign language interpreters that didn’t know what they were doing. His advocacy and publicity in the Salem Statesman-Journal compelled Salem Health to hire an additional sign language agency to meet the needs of deaf patients.
Ludwig told The Lund Report he wanted the state to amend the bill again to apply the certification standards to video remote interpreting services, which he said hospitals often provide instead of an in-person interpreter. Nothing in the amended bill passed by the health committee appears to explicitly deal with video interpreters.
“I’ve lived in five different states before coming to Oregon,” said Ludwig, according the Department of Human Services’ website. He sits on the agency’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing Advisory Committee. “This is the state where I see the most significant disparity in having resources and services for the deaf, deaf plus, deaf blind, hard of hearing and late deafness community. I want to see a significant change in that.”
Wolfe won a lawsuit against the Portland Police Bureau in 2013 after the dispatch failed to provide a qualified sign language interpreter in response to a 911 call to a domestic violence situation at Wolfe’s home.
HB 2419 now goes for a vote before the House of Representatives next week. It will then go through the same vetting process in the Senate.
