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Anna Kaplan Statesville Record and Landmark

Maria Boaze, a Spanish interpreter for the Iredell County Health Department, saw a patient last week who had been planning on going to an outside doctor but came to the health department instead.
The pregnant Hispanic woman had received services at the health department before and was confident that she would have ready access to an interpreter who could explain in her native language what was happening with her baby, according to Boaze.
Hispanic patients “feel comfortable with our staff, they open up to us, and that’s really important with any patient,” she said.
The number of Spanish speakers who use social services is rapidly growing in Iredell County, and so is the county’s spending on language services.
“The fact of the matter is we’re paying for that, and then (the school system) has to educate them,” County Commissioner Ken Robertson said at this weekend’s county planning retreat.
But the money does move in cycles, with Hispanic contributions to the economy evening out the spending.
In 2005, some 19 percent of the dental patients, 24 percent of the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) patients, 36 percent of family-planning patients, 55 percent of child health patients and 76 percent of maternal health patients who visited the Iredell County Health Department were Hispanic.
The biggest effect of these numbers is the added spending on translation services. The health department now has two full-time interpreters, several part-time contract interpreters and a number of bilingual staff.
The annual cost for interpreters is $141,722.
The interpreters have to be medically certified, meaning they must take classes and undergo testing in terminology and protocol, said Susan Johnson, the director of nursing at the health department. (more…)

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