Background: Effective patient-provider communication in the operating room (OR) is critical to ensuring patient safety and delivering high-quality care, particularly for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP).
Purpose: This quality improvement project aimed to determine the effectiveness of an interpreter services education session delivered to anesthesia providers to increase knowledge and usage of video-remote interpreter services for surgical LEP patients at a level I trauma and certified burn center in Providence, Rhode Island.
Methods: A structured educational session was provided, and pre-and post-questionnaires were delivered electronically six weeks before and after the educational session to a convenience sample. This project used descriptive and inferential statistics, including a Wilcoxon sign-ranked test.
Results: Thirty-two anesthesia providers participated in the survey, with the majority being experienced CRNAs, female, and White/Caucasian. Notably, only 25% spoke more than one language, and participants only used interpreter services preoperatively. Post-intervention data indicated a significant change in provider awareness and knowledge of risks and unfavorable outcomes faced by LEP patients (p = 0.039), highlighting the ongoing need for further education on language services and LEP patients.
Conclusion: An educational intervention to increase knowledge and usage of interpreter services among anesthesia providers reinforced the already known need for further education to increase awareness of risks faced by LEP patients. However, prevalent barriers including limited understanding of hospital policy, language services, LEP patients, equipment, and department culture highlight the need for ongoing education for anesthesia providers and system-level support to ensure consistent and equitable use of interpreter services in the perioperative setting.
