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The Minority Ethnic Elders Advocacy Project (MEEA)

Access to Statutory Services: from the perspective of both Minority Ethnic Elders and External Organisations

Summary report written and produced by NWREN as part of the MEEA Project

NWREN, February 2015, Belinda Gammon

A full, referenced, copy of this report is available on request, or from

www.nwren.org

MEEA Project Language Report

The report examines the perspective of minority ethnic elder groups, individuals and

statutory providers, within North Wales, on the importance and difficulties in the provision

of ‘own dialect interpreting services’.

The report is an initial step in a longitudinal study, with the aim of bringing together both

the perspectives of service providers and their MEE clients, exploring, with reference to

own dialect interpreting provision, the difference between the experience of MEE when

accessing statutory services and the intentions of providers delivering those services.

The sometimes rhetorical and fragmented debate on the importance of language and own

‘dialect translation services’ is historically and currently well documented in both academic

and ‘grey’ literature. The report is a contribution to better understanding and presents

clear empirical evidence of both need and service limitations and as such, the data are

intended to demonstrate need rather than elicited criticism. These findings are not

unique to North Wales, they correlate with findings across Britain. However, what may be

a unique asset to North Wales is the level of genuine engagement and co-operation

between the participating statutory and voluntary service providers.

The aims and objectives were to collate, formally, the incidence of poor access to own

dialect interpreting provision and to ascertain the impact on minority ethnic elders of the

difficulties encountered with comprehension and translation. The aim of this research is to

use the data to advocate and promote a better understanding of the translation needs of

minority ethnic elders with a view to informing future provision and policy decisions across

Wales.

The findings were divided into four factors: physical, psychological/emotional, financial

and practical. The experience amongst the service providers was that there is little

realisation, on the part of frontline service provision staff, in both Primary and Secondary

Care, that time, translation and outcome are conjoined. This lack of awareness is

universally documented across all statutory sectors in the North of Wales, with the service

providers reporting concerns that their commitment, at strategic level, to the provision of

interpreting services as a duty of care, is not fulfilled universally by frontline staff. In the

Health Care sector, beneficiaries provided anecdotal examples of how this manifests itself

at each of the three critical stages of progress through the healthcare system. For

example, point of entry – accessing support and assessment; receiving treatment or

support; and lastly, the transition from hospital/health-centre based support to home-

based support and/or maintenance of any new self-care routine.

The disparities between the findings and the activities of agencies (such as BCUHB and

others) are important data. The disjunction between the experience of our informants and

the intentions of the agencies is important. The data also illustrate the need for a single

protocol across agencies to encourage and empower service users to request appropriate

dialect interpretation services.

Promoting Equality · challenging discrimination · upholding human rights

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