An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: educating interpreters about the risk of vicarious trauma in healthcare settings
Temas
Detalles
Interpreters working in healthcare situations often must manage thetransfer of information under difficult circumstances. The content of the message may be highly emotional or primarily negative, or one or moreof the parties in the interpreted encounter may be extremely vulnerableor in a debilitated psychological or physical state. Such circumstances par-ticularly ring true in the healthcare context. In these cases, an interpreter’srepeated exposure to traumatic information and the traumatized states of others can lead to a significant accumulation of occupational stress. For the well-being of interpreters working in healthcare, employers, practitioners,and educators in the field must develop an understanding of the potentialfor the vicarious traumatization of healthcare interpreters.
In Malcolm, K & Swabey, L. (Eds.), In our hands: Educating healthcare interpreters, pp. 105-130.