American School for the Deaf, Hartford HealthCare partner for sign language interpreter program

CT Insider – Sunday, December 1, 2024
By Cris Villalonga-Vivoni

When Kat Northup actively interprets spoken words into American Sign Language for a deaf person, she said her goal is to create such seamless communication that it’s as if she isn’t in the room. She uses her facial expressions and body to convey spoken humor, questions or explanations into the 3D visual language to quickly and accurately translate the conversation back and forth.

Northup grew up in the deaf community with multiple deaf and deafblind family members. She said her father is deaf, and her mother worked as an interpreter, so ASL was her first language growing up. In high school, she started working as an interpreter and gained her national certification with guidance from her parents.

Now, 24 years later, she said her high school job became a lifelong career and passion that took her from Arkansas to Connecticut to be the coordinator for the West Hartford-based American School for the Deaf community interpreting program.

She is also one of the leaders of a new statewide effort to offer school-employed ASL medical interpreting services for deaf, hard of hearing and deafblind patients across the Hartford HealthCare system. Their goal is to address the communication gaps that deaf, hard of hearing, and deafblind community members face when accessing health care.

She said the partnership, which took effect Oct. 1, has already doubled the school agency’s workload and there are many scheduled appointments for 2025.

“Thinking about all of those patients that got that communication access, it makes the number of requests coming in worth it,” Northup said.

The American School for the Deaf was founded in 1817 and offers a variety of educational programs and services for deaf and hard-of-hearing people across all stages of life. The school began offering an ASL community interpreting services program in 2016 after the closure of the state’s Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

Northup said the Commission managed all the interpreting services for Connecticut, but other agencies were created to fill the need when it was closed. She said the school also started offering community interpreting services because of its deep connection to and nuanced understanding of the deaf community.

In a press conference announcing the partnership with Hartford HealthCare, the school’s Executive Director Jeffrey Bravin said communication barriers in health settings limit access to quality care and affect provider-patient relationships. He said poor communication can also lead to worsening health problems.

Many challenges with fulfilling in-person interpreting requests relate to an ongoing nationwide ASL interpreter shortage. Northup said there is also a limited number of interpreters for tactile and pro-tactile, which are forms of communication that involve touch to convey spoken language to a deafblind person.

“We kind of have this aging out (workforce) and then we have the gap from the newer coming in that aren’t yet ready for some of these legal, medical, political type jobs,” Northup said.

Since 2021, the American School for the Deaf has been working to study the needs of the deaf community, identify gaps and begin addressing them with the help of American Rescue Plan funding. Bravin said they worked with many community partners and organizations, like Hartford HealthCare, to improve communication access, such as offering free transparent masks to hospitals and community members.

The school also launched the “Lost in Translation” media campaign to raise awareness of the communication barriers in medical and social settings when interpreting services aren’t adequately provided. Bravin said their work helped in the re-opening of a state agency dedicated to meeting the needs of the deaf community.

Elizabeth DeRosa, the school’s director of institutional advancement, said the school and Hartford HealthCare have had multiple conversations. She said they also worked with its medical staff to develop a training video to help medical staff better work with deaf, hard of hearing and deafblind patients. DeRosa said the video is being used for Hartford HealthCare’s staff training to build a baseline understanding of deaf culture in their work.

As part of the new partnership, the school will provide both in-person and video remote interpreting services, assistive listening devices and note-takers during medical appointments or emergency visits for patients and their families.

Hartford HealthCare pays for the ASL interpreter or communication tools at an agreed flat rate, so services are at no cost to patients. American School for the Deaf employs a network of 60 interpreters based and sent across the state, the majority of whom are qualified medical interpreters.

Northup said Hartford HealthCare will immediately reach out to the school whenever a patient indicates a communication preference and asks for interpreting service for a pre-scheduled appointment. She said they would try to fill the request with an interpreter from ASD or their independent contractor.

Northup said their goal is to have an in-person interpreter arrive within an hour for last-minute appointments and emergencies. She said they will also be able to provide video-remote interpreting on demand, which isn’t optimal but can be helpful in an emergency.

Due to the shortage, there will be some challenges to meeting every single need due to the on-going shortage. Northup said they are working with innovative ways to address that as well. For example, she said American School for the Deaf recently launched a traveling interpreter program to encourage ASL interpreters nationwide to temporarily live and work in Connecticut as part of the school’s agencies. She said they’ve already successfully recruited and moved interpreters to the state, especially as the new partnership kicks off.

Hartford HealthCare has over 500 locations and serves more than one and half million patients across Connecticut, said Dr. Ajay Kumar, executive vice president and chief clinical officer, at the press conference. He said that the new partnership is a step forward to advancing the care the health system provides to patients, but there’s still a lot of work left to do.

“I believe that communication is a major part of the care process. Without that, you really cannot provide good quality care. We are all about quality and advancing the safety in the organization in heart for healthcare,” Kumar said. “With this partnership, I’m very convinced that we are going to be advancing the quality and safety journey for our patients.”

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