NY Groups Sue Pharmacies Over (Lack of) Translation

Make the Road by Walking and New York Immigration Coalition, two excellent organizations in NYC, last week announced their campaign against pharmacies in NY for discriminating against non-English speakers. The suit is specifically against 16 pharmacies Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, some of which are operated by Rite Aid, CVS, Duane Reade, Walgreens and Wal-Mart.

According to the NYTimes article, the complaint argues that federal civil rights law and state health regulations require pharmacies to provide linguistic help to guarantee that people who speak little or no English receive equal access to health care. That assistance should include interpreters at pharmacies and written translations of medication instructions, the advocates say...

The complaints also cite the New York Education Law, which requires that medications be labeled in a way that ordinary people can understand. That is meaningless if they are in a language the patient does not comprehend, Mr. [Andrew] Friedman, [the director of MRNY] said.

As an intern for the NYUSOM's Center for Immigrant Health (CIH) 3 years ago, I learned first -hand some of the difficulties non-English speakers face in their attempt to get medical care, or in this case prescriptions.

For example, if prescription dosages are written only in English, there are often many problems with translations, even with numbers, which you would assume would make things simpler, not more complicated. The classic example is: "Take ONCE weekly" to a spanish-speaker looks like "ONCE" or Eleven-times.

MRNY, the NYC Immigration Coaltion, and CIH are among a number of groups researching and advocating for a variety of solutions to these problems, ranging from the kind of legal and legislative strategies in the NYTimes article, to remote simultaneous medical interpreting (RSMI), which CIH has done extensive research on, in conjunction with several city hospitals. I recently had a disagreement with a friend about the merits of simultaneous vs. non-simultaneous translation. While there may be disagreement about the best methods to solve some of these problems, there are still way too few resources devoted to researching and strategizing to fix the problem, especially when considered in comparison with the number of medical mistakes that happen every year as a result of language problems.