Monteiro Elissa M, Hyde Carly, Guardado Dilian, Rosenau Kashia A, Kuo Alice
School of Education/Department of School Psychology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, USA.
Psychiatry, University of California Riverside School of Medicine, Riverside, USA.
Cureus. 2023 Sep 21;15(9):e45712. doi: 10.7759/cureus.45712. eCollection 2023 Sep.
Autism is a developmental disability that exists across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic boundaries. Unfortunately, the lived experiences of autistic individuals and their families as supported by evidence in the existing literature suggest that culturally and linguistically diverse families' engagement in healthcare and education face a multitude of challenges, particularly during high-stakes meetings and healthcare appointments (e.g., Individualized Education Plan meetings, patient visits, and diagnostic results interpretation meetings). These challenges prevent culturally and linguistically diverse autistic individuals from accessing adequate care. In this paper, we propose solutions to be adopted by healthcare and education systems to address those challenges. First, we urge providers to address the systemic problems that commonly occur during meetings. Second, we propose service providers adopt a cultural and linguistic 'match' process. We recommend asking families about their specific language preferences and ensuring the selection of translators who speak the family's preferred language and dialect. Employing these transformations will require education and healthcare systems to allocate more resources for translation services to enhance the training and recruitment of interpreters and ensure that interpreter-family pairs are provided time for consultation prior to high-stakes meetings. Ultimately, these adaptations to the service provision environment would produce opportunities for translators to act as cultural liaisons and, with time, become trusted partners for families.
自闭症是一种跨越种族、民族、语言和社会经济界限的发育障碍。不幸的是，现有文献中的证据所支持的自闭症患者及其家庭的生活经历表明，文化和语言背景多样的家庭在参与医疗保健和教育方面面临诸多挑战，尤其是在高风险会议和医疗预约期间（例如，个性化教育计划会议、患者就诊以及诊断结果解读会议）。这些挑战使得文化和语言背景多样的自闭症患者无法获得充分的护理。在本文中，我们提出了医疗保健和教育系统应采用的解决方案，以应对这些挑战。首先，我们敦促医疗服务提供者解决会议期间常见的系统性问题。其次，我们建议服务提供者采用文化和语言“匹配”流程。我们建议询问家庭他们的具体语言偏好，并确保选择能说家庭首选语言和方言的翻译人员。实施这些变革将要求教育和医疗保健系统为翻译服务分配更多资源，以加强对口译员的培训和招聘，并确保在高风险会议之前为译员与家庭的配对提供咨询时间。最终，这些对服务提供环境的调整将为翻译人员创造机会，使其能够充当文化联络人，并随着时间的推移成为家庭信赖的伙伴。
