Twenty-four dedicated, bilingual professionals from the medical, dental, public health, and social service fields participated in the training and represented twelve different organizations across the county including: Mendocino Coast Clinics, Anderson Valley Health Center, MCHC-Hillside, Potter Valley Community Health Center, Redwood Coast Medical Services, Alliance for Rural Community Health, UVMC, Ukiah Valley Primary Care Group, Mendocino Coast District Hospital, Mendocino County Departments of Social Services and Public Health, NCO Head Start, and the Cancer Resource Center. The trainees gathered at Ukiah's Department of Public Health for the forty-hour session where they learned effective communication techniques, roles of the interpreter, detailed medical terminology and common complications, proper interpretation procedures, and how to advocate and explain cultural differences to providers in a professional manner. As a complement to these interpretive services, Vickie Patterson, Executive Director of Nuestra Casa, addressed the group and informed them of her organization's capacity to translate written documents from English to Spanish, one of the many services offered for Mendocino County's Spanish speaking residents.

This type of training has been long overdue in Mendocino County. "[The workshop] came about as a response to a lack of qualified and trained competent medical interpreters in health care facilities throughout our County and an effort to help minorities gain access to health care," explains Sara O'Donnell, Executive Director of the Cancer Resource Center. While many health care organizations employ bilingual staff, most are untrained interpreters who are unfamiliar with complex medical terminology. If an interpreter is not available, a patient with limited English proficiency (LEP) is often asked to bring their own interpreter, most commonly a family member and frequently a child; this can lead to a misdiagnosis or worse. This is significant, since according to the 2000 Census only 6% of Spanish speaking households in Mendocino County reported that they spoke English "very well."

Many trainees were surprised to learn that by law health care institutions receiving federal funding are required to provide interpretation services to persons with limited English proficiency. Consequently, a lack of these services inhibits effective communication between the patient and provider and could be perceived as discrimination on the basis of national origin. In order to circumvent these regulations, many institutions do subscribe to phone-based professional interpreter services, but they're underutilized; the high cost, up to $4 per minute, renders this an undesirable option for health care facilities.

Using inexperienced interpreters in a medical setting can be potentially dangerous. It not only impedes the delivery of quality health care, but can also be economically wasteful, resulting in an increase in doctor-patient visits, costly errors in diagnoses, longer hospital stays, and missed appointments. On the other hand, investing in interpretation and translation services can help to improve the delivery of health care, save money, and build trust in the communities being served.

"I've taken other courses on medical interpretation and this one was the best," says Ana Cox, Dental Clinic Manager of the Mendocino Coast Clinics and a former phone-based professional interpreter who participated in the workshop, "[a number of the participants] are planning to form the first Mendocino County Interpreters Association. This would be a group of interpreters available to the community for interpretive services." This type of cooperative organization is starting to appear in other parts of California. Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, for example, take part in interpreter-sharing networks with other participating hospitals. This will no doubt mean substantial savings in malpractice and interpreter budgets.

There is a follow-up training through the Cross Cultural Health Care Program that trains individuals to become trainers in medical interpretation. Many of the workshop participants are eager to advance to this next level of training and encourage the health care facilities to use professional interpreters. This workshop was made possible through grants from the Mendocino County Tobacco Settlement funds.