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About our Interpreters
Competent, effective health care requires knowledge, skills and abilities. Patient health is no place for amateurs. The risks are too high. That’s why Blue Ridge AHEC encourages area practitioners to use trained health care interpreters when seeing Limited English Proficiency (LEP) patients and provides trained interpreters for hire on an as-needed basis.
All Community Health Interpreter Service interpreters have passed a rigorous oral and written exam to establish their language proficiency both in English and their target language. CHIS interpreters have also completed the Cross Cultural Health Care Program’s nationally-recognized forty-hour "Bridging the Gap" curriculum to train qualified bilingual persons to provide professional interpretation in health and medical care encounters.
During the course of the training, each interpreter learns how to best serve as a conduit, clarifier, cultural broker and advocate to the patient and the provider. The motto of the graduates of the "Bridging the Gap" training is "interpret everything that is said, exactly as it is said; add nothing, omit nothing, change nothing."
