This post is part one of two. The first part will explain generally what a profession is and make distinctions between what some may consider a profession and what is truly a profession. The second post will consider the current comments of government surrounding the MoJ and other contracts to further highlight the fallacy behind outsourcing for those that should be considered professionals and the risks the government are incurring with this strategy.
The term profession is often bandied about. Anyone can call themselves a professional: marketeers, IT personnel, plumbers.
Let’s be clear. There is something beyond these albeit worthy roles. This is about a professional. One who has a Code of Ethics or Professional Conduct, a CRB check, has a high level of training, alongside specialised knowledge and skills, belongs to an organised regulator and has responsibility to a community and is concerned with its welfare above all else.
Teachers will tell you the supply teacher is all but gone in the UK. Rather than employ a qualified teacher to plug any gaps in timetables it is the new employee at the front of the class: one who is on a Registered Teacher Programme (RTP), who is not as yet qualified to teach. Or worse, sometimes it is the Teaching Assistant who is left holding the fort.
Psychologists will tell you that work previously done by highly qualified and trained Psychologists is now being done by those trained in IAPT: Improving Access to Psychological Therapies. You now need to pass a one year course to deliver CBT.
Nurses will tell you a lot of their work is now done by Health Care Assistants.
There are many similarities between the above three professions and interpreting, whether spoken or for sign language. You should be bound by a Code of Ethics or Professional Conduct, have an enhanced CRB check, professional insurance, be accessing supervision and be registered with the appropriate professional body in order to work. In fact all the criteria mentioned at the start of this article.
What is different with interpreting and what Sign Language interpreters have been discussing for a long time is the lack of legal protection. Were interpreters to be legally protected, it would be illegal to work as an interpreter unless you were a registered professional in the same way you can not legally work as a doctor if you are struck off the medical register held by the GMC.
Why? This goes back to the list of what it is to be a professional and the responsibility we have to the community we serve. Over the last 25-30 years we have witnessed and heard terrible stories of what happens when you do not have a registered interpreter. We have fought as a profession to raise and safeguard those standards and to continue to develop the profession.
We have heard about the level 2 ‘signer’ work in a court room (the equivalent of conversational French). We have heard about the police tape that got pulled apart by the defence team due to the sub-standard interpreting causing the eventual collapse of a case. We know the all too familiar stories of mishaps, misdiagnoses, even deaths. We all know the students who leave schools and colleges without qualifications because they didn’t understand the ‘communicator’. These aren’t the stories of yesteryear, the bad old days before we had a register and better qualifications, though both of those points are moot. These are fast becoming today’s stories.
You would not allow a Health Care Assistant to draw blood or dispense medication. You would not allow an IAPT practitioner to diagnose someone with schizophrenia. You would not allow a Teaching Assistant to deliver A Level Physics or PSHE. This creates rather than mitigates risk. Risks to standards, to service delivery, to people.
When you allow an untrained, unregistered interpreter to work in a hospital, a courtroom or a police station you play with risk, you create risk. And nobody present can monitor that.
It is why we have Codes of Ethics for professionals. Interpreters, in the same way as other professions, cannot always be monitored. They are responsible for monitoring their own actions and behaviours, to be responsible for themselves and those they serve. Codes of Ethics were borne out of the Hippocratic Oath, the fundamental principle of which is do no harm.
Employ someone who is not a professional, you no longer have those safeguards. No matter what monitoring has been added to the contract the commissioner is not omnipresent. Even if they were they would not be qualified in assessing whether that person was competent and had successfully completed their duties. Does the commissioner, judge, solicitor, doctor, nurse have access to the languages the ‘interpreter’ purports to know? Is someone unregistered really someone you can trust?
The only safeguard is simply to use a professional, one who is appropriately trained and registered. In the UK, where a framework agreement exists for interpreting that safeguard has been all but removed.
NHS
There are 9 posts tagged NHS (this is page 4 of 5).
One Stop Shopping
Outsourcing or One Stop Shops. Words that strike fear into the heart of the Sign Language Interpreter. A word that means the work that they previously did direct or though one agency for a council, a hospital or a court now has to go through a larger spoken language agency.
This seems nonsensical to the jobbing interpreter, but ultimately makes sense to the statutory organisation. The logic or process goes like this: we use many interpreters for many different languages. British Sign Language (BSL) is a language. Our staff do not know how to book interpreters so we will employ an organisation who can do this for us. We will save money by employing an agency to cover our interpretation and translation needs (which will include those difficult to source sign language interpreters)…
We will go through a lengthy procurement process where agencies will try to outbid each other to win a contract at a unit price that is ultimately unsustainable. Organisation will expect said agencies to put something in their tender about quality but really it is tokenism for we will only be awarding a contract on the basis of costs. We will award contract to cheapest provider regardless…
Spoken language agency will not understand how to source a BSL interpreter and will sub-contract a specialist agency. They will think they can pay BSL interpreter the same as a spoken language interpreter and when they start the contract will get a big shock. Specialist BSL agency eventually agrees to reduced price sub-contract as all previous work they did is now being outsourced to spoken language agencies who have little understanding of deaf people and BSL interpreters. Specialist BSL agency still wants to survive in market where they get less work. BSL agency asks BSL interpreter to work for less fees. BSL interpreter, if accepting fees, finds they are working for a lot less than before. BSL interpreter is then providing profit for two separate contracts. BSL interpreter considers leaving the profession as they can not survive as an interpreter and must consider another career. Deaf people get less experienced and maybe unregistered interpreters as a result.
Time for a real life example… One of the biggest culprits is Language Empire and Remark Interpreting. Language Empire has a contract to provide interpreting for ATOS. ATOS has the contract for the Government’s Department of Work and Pensions medical assessments. ATOS carry out assessments to decide if the claimant should be allowed incapacity benefit or if they are fit to work. There are problems for disabled people in general with these assessments. MPs themselves have stated the assessments are flawed. The ATOS machine rumbles on… so who do they employ to do the interpreting? Language Empire. An agency who is so ignorant of BSL it calls it British Special Language. The images of hands on its ‘BSL’ page are not of any recognisable signs and they state they have ‘special disability interpreters’. Nobody actually knows what this means. Their webpage has caused BSL interpreters much mirth but complete dismay at their ignorance.
The worst is yet to come. A deaf-led agency has now started to sub-contract for Language Empire. At least the RNID (now Action on Hearing Loss) when sub-contracting for The Big Word stood up for BSL interpreters and helped The Big Word understand the BSL interpreting profession. This organisation has done nothing for interpreters or the deaf community it proposes to serve. They continue to try to source BSL interpreters at greatly reduced cost for what it’s contractors call British Special Language. This particular agency states one of their aims as supporting and enhancing the lives of Deaf, hard of hearing and blind individuals.’ I don’t think so.
Meanwhile we hear of regular reports of yet another council, organisation or government department outsourcing or looking for a ‘one stop shop’. When the agency is not reputable, the cost to the organisation generally remains the same but the quality drops off. With BSL usually representing something around 2% of a contract, the interpreter or deaf person loses out. What used to cost an organisation £100 – £160 per booking average direct, now costs the same or worse (Freedom of Information requests by interpreters show this to be the case due to sub-contracting).
The fact costs have barely been saved is not important. It’s the ramifications to the profession and subsequently deaf people that matters. Spoken language agencies generally do not understand the NRCPD registration system for sign language interpreters. These agencies are more likely to employ someone with level 1 or 2 in sign language (equivalent to a GCSE or A Level in French) thinking this is acceptable. It may be if we were native BSL users but as interpreters, by the nature of the job, we are mostly people that can hear, and we tend to have English as our first language. Therefore, most people with a basic qualification in BSL do not have enough fluency to interpret anything but someone buying a cup of coffee much less a medical appointment. Would you try to interpret consent for an operation to a French man if you had GCSE French?
Every qualified registered interpreter has been to an appointment where the deaf person said but that’s not what the interpreter said last week. Take the case recently of an elderly deaf man who thought he was having a minor operation on his shoulder. The hospital had provided an ‘interpreter’ the week before to sign the consent forms. When the registered interpreter arrived a week later the patient was shocked to discover he would be having a a major operation that day under general anaesthetic. What will it take to stop this… A malpractice lawsuit? A death? Rumour has it that already happened but unless someone actually does anything about it, the government outsourcing machine continues, the big agencies profit and deaf people lose out.