Communication Case

Recently I was working on a weekend when most of the hospital is closed and many supervisors or directors are very difficult to get in touch with if you are able to reach them at all. The issue occurred early in our work day we were only taking class so there were no face to face interactions for the day expected which makes the day very unpredictable, I received a call from a patient that did not speak any English she only spoke Spanish, our guidelines for dealing with this is to call to an outside interpreter service that the hospital uses, I made the call only to find out that the services was temporarily not available. I struggled to tell the caller to be patient while I get my coworker who is bilingual to translate or take care of her concerns, my coworker was able to discuss with her the concerns that she had and clear the anxiety the caller was having; after we struggled for over an hour just to get in touch with a supervisor the entire time we hope to only get Spanish callers because we knew no other language besides English and Spanish. The situation was slightly resolved due to the hospital having a few of the translators come in on their off day for over time to help deal with the callers that did not speak English, another way besides this that I believe the issue could have be resolved would be to have multiple services available to take care of interpreting calls and also to have a much larger bilingual staff.

...