The £1.2m cost of health translators

LOCAL health services are shelling out more than a million pounds a year on translators for patients who don’t speak English.

Pennine Acute Trust, which runs four hospitals including the Royal Oldham, last year spent £1.2 million on interpretation services.

In addition, NHS Oldham, the primary care trust, expects this year to spend £230,000 on interpreters in around 40 different languages for people using community health services.

Pennine Acute Trust has a team of 18 part-time interpreters in South Asian languages working at the Royal Oldham and Fairfield Hospital, Bury.

It also has a bank of 100 translators, with 40 more going through the recruitment process, to provide a service to all of it’s hospitals.

Angela Wood, patient partnership manager and quality leader for Pennine Acute Trust, explained that having in-house translators, combined with a new telephone interpretation service to outpatients at a 76p a minute cost to the trust, has helped cut the costs of translation. But a significant increase in demand for the service over the last six months bumped the cost up again.

Hospital interpreters work in 65 different languages.

The most commonly requested by patients at the Royal Oldham, are Urdu, Bangla, Gujarati, Polish, Farsi, Kurdish, Cantonese/Mandarin and Pashto.

Colin Scales, director of commissioning for NHS Oldham, said communication was key to providing high quality care.

The £230,000 spent by NHS Oldham this year includes the cost of more than 2,000 face-to-face sessions, as well as other language support services.

Just over half the requests for interpreter support services in the community are from GPs and their support staff.

The rest are from other community-based staff, including health visitors and community therapists.

The four most requested languages for interpreters are Bengali, Kurdish, Farsi and Urdu, which together amount to just over half of the requests received.