Interpreting Service

The Interpreting Service supports all Bradford Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust staff in hospital and community settings to effectively communicate with patients and carers who are unable to speak and/or understand English and deaf patients and carers who use British Sign Language.

Interpreters are used in a variety of situations:

•  To obtain a medical history from a patient and obtain information about the current problem, including symptoms and the impact of the symptoms.
• To discuss diagnosis and treatment options.
• To obtain consent from a patient for any treatment or procedure.
• Delivering bad news.
• Any occasion when significant information needs to be conveyed to a patient who does not speak English. (‘Significant’ would refer to any information about changes to treatment or changes in symptoms, and for review meetings.).

Services

We provide the following services to Foundation Trust staff and departments:

• Face-to-face interpreting
• British Sign Language interpreting
• Telephone interpreting
• Video interpreting
• Translation
• Braille
• Advice

The Interpreting Service meets over 50,000 requests for services annually.

The top 10 languages requested through the year were:

• Urdu/Punjabi
• Czech/Slovak
• Arabic
• Polish
• Bengali
• Hungarian
• Kurdish
• Pushto
• Farsi
• BSL

To contact us for appointment queries please call 01274 274274.

Monday – Friday 09.00 – 17.00

CardMedic is the latest innovation we have adopted as part of our ‘Clinical Insite’ membership of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme.

CardMedic is a language translation app available to our staff. It is an A-Z collection of digital flashcards written by clinical experts, simply and succinctly. It replicates conversations around common healthcare topics with simple questions and explanations to guide the interaction between patient and carer.

We intend to use CardMedic to supplement our existing interpreting service, providing help with translation where it wouldn’t be convenient or appropriate to call for an interpreter. Or where an interpreter is unavailable.

CardMedic will be of great benefit to patients and staff to facilitate communication in a variety of accessible formats.

Content can be translated into 49 different languages, and each translation has been human-reviewed for accuracy. Some cards have sign language videos, and many provide an ‘Easyread’ format intended for use with patients who have learning difficulties or cognitive impairments such as dementia.

Our talented and compassionate staff help care for a diverse population, which is what makes Bradford such a special place to work. Choosing the right people is key to our success. If you think you’ve got what it takes, please contact us by email at careers@bthft.nhs.uk to discover more about our latest opportunities.