A&E aids end language barrier pain

Lost in translation, it could sound like an offer of Xanax, but with new language aids at hospital A&Es, the challenge of treating foreign-language patients is set to be overcome.

Developed by the Health Service Executive (HSE) as part of its intercultural health strategy, this “Emergency Multilingual Aid (EMA) box” consists of a welcome sheet in several languages; language identification cards where the patient can identify which language he or she speaks and 20 multilingual phrasebooks in languages identified as most widely spoken in our hospitals.

Unsurprisingly, Polish, Czech, Latvian and Romanian feature among them. Surprisingly, Urdu, Cantonese and Irish do too.