Pediatric ICU study finds communication time doubles when families initiate access to interpreters

Language barriers may be particularly harmful in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), where families encounter challenging, often life-changing medical decisions. In many hospitals, a member of the health care team, and not the family, decides when to use interpretation services.

In the first study to investigate the impact of providing families with direct access to interpreter technology, researchers from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago found that communication time with the medical team doubled among families who speak a language other than English. Results were published in the journal Hospital Pediatrics.

“We designed a simple, low-cost intervention that empowers families by allowing them to initiate access to interpreters,” said lead author Mary Pilarz, MD, a critical care physician at Lurie Children’s and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“We were surprised at how much communication with clinicians increased,” she said. “This is exciting, since we know from previous research that professional interpretation improves outcomes, but it tends to be underused. Our aim was to increase interpreter use and hopefully achieve better partnership with non-English-speaking families of children in intensive care.”

As part of the study intervention, families were encouraged to independently initiate interpretation using hospital-provided tablets. Each patient’s room had a video interpreter tablet with instructions in the family’s primary language.

The study included 158 families in the pre-intervention group and 271 in the post-intervention group. By analyzing billing data, researchers found that the average duration of interpreter use per patient-day increased from seven to 16 minutes.