The Importance of Soft Skills for Healthcare Interpreting

Understand how an interpreter's soft skills impacts patient care and outcomes. Interpreting is more than transmitting language.
About this Event

In today’s healthcare landscape, consumer's perception of how they were treated impacts their experience, often more so than the medical team’s actual technical skills and clinical knowledge. While historical emphasis has been placed on mastering hard skills for job performance, including knowledge of the source and target languages, interpreting techniques and strong adherence to the CPC for ethical practice, it is becoming more apparent that prowess with soft skills leads to improved patient satisfaction, as well as professional outcomes and productivity. Much of what interpreters do in healthcare is “patient facing”, which is in essence customer service work. Respecting the impact an interpreter has on deaf patient perceptions of professionalism, compassion, and respect is critical to overall success. Proper use of soft skills provides an environment in which the healthcare team, which the interpreter is a member of, can work together to ethically provide the best patient care possible to their deaf and hard of hearing consumers. Although this workshop is designed for seasoned medical interpreters to continue in acquiring proficiency with soft skills, any level of interpreter can benefit from deliberate practice to strengthen their professional lives in this area.

By the end of the workshop, lecture participants will be able to:

1. Assess personal proficiency on a list of soft skills.

2. Define and differentiate between hard skills and soft skills.

3. Connect aspects of soft skills with tenets of ethical practice for interpreters.

4. Evaluate ethical scenarios utilizing specific soft skills as a framework for discussion.

5. Examine the importance of soft skills in the work of interpreters during various group

activities.

6. Debate with colleagues about interactions and communications with other members of the

healthcare team.

Accomodations:

This workshop is presented in spoken English and utilizes visuals such as powerpoint. Please contact [email protected] for any needed accomodations, as early as possible. Two weeks notice is greatly appreciated. We are happy to make this workshop as accessible as possible.