Interpreting Practices for Refugee and Immigrant Patients in U.S. Hospital Outpatient Clinics

• In Event: 360 - Section on Medical Sociology Paper Session. Ethnography and Health Quality in a Global Context

Abstract

This paper is based on nine months of fieldwork at a hospital in Maine. Sixty-nine adult immigrant patients (including refugees and asylees) and their interpreters were observed during 85 visits to two different outpatient clinics. The paper considers how biomedicine as an organizing framework may be reworked during staffs’ responses to and uses of interpreters during medical appointments.

Author

• Susan E. Bell, Bowdoin College