Congratulations to the Monash Health Language Services team, who are our STAR Award winners for “Improving Care and Access”.
The award is given to a team who develop new ways to help patients or colleagues feel safe, included, and experience improved equity of care, and who foster partnerships with our community to enhance patient independence and wellbeing.
(The Language Services team in 2018)
Since May 2021 the Language Services team has provided 24,000 interpreting occasions of services to consumers at the Monash Health run COVID vaccination centres.
At the start of the COVID vaccination rollout, the team rapidly expanded their service to provide interpreters at Monash Health’s mass vaccination sites in a timely and efficient way.
The Language Services team play an integral role in making consumers with languages other than English feel comfortable when accessing our health service. Here’s a message, via an interpreter, as requested by two Farsi speaking families:
“Thanks for helping the Afghan community to vaccinate by having a clinic at Dandenong market. It’s convenient to bring all our families as some families don’t have transport and Dandenong market is an easy place to get to. Thank you for having the interpreters to help us. It made a big difference with the language barrier. We are spreading the word among our community to get vaccinated at Dandenong market.”
Employees at the vaccination centres also wish to pass on their heartfelt gratitude to our amazing interpreters. Our interpreters provide independent, unbiased, confidential, complete and accurate interpreting for both parties, and can be accessed through our Interpreter Booking System.
We all want to pass on a big thank you to the Language Services team for improving the access and ease of receiving COVID vaccinations for our consumers from non-English Speaking backgrounds!
If you would like to nominate a colleague or team, you can do so at any time by visiting the STAR Awards portal. For more information about the STAR Awards program, visit the Monash Health COVID-19 website.
Approved by Karen Lowe