PREVIEW: "The Willie Ramirez Case: Failed Communication & Tragic Results" with Gail Price-Wise

0:18 thank you for joining us today on voices academy.com our program is uh a conversation about a particular case study involving a malpractice soup uh related to inter interpreting we have with us today Gail pricewise and um she's going to be talking to us about a book that she's written about this particular case study thank you for joining us today oh you're welcome now Gail you are in the health profession you have a master's in public health from Harvard yes um now how did that lead you to have an interest in cultural competency yeah well I've always been interested in how race and ethnicity affects Health outcomes as a public health professional um it's all about whether the patients is is healthy or not healthy for me it's all about the

1:03 health outcome and for um for years I've always been interested in um patients from different cultural backgrounds I've done a lot of traveling I've always been sympathetic to people from different cultural backgrounds um my grandma and my all my grandparents are immigrants um so I heard about this case of Willie Ramirez it's a very high-profile malpractice case that was caused at least in part by an interpreting error mhm and um it's often cited in the literature about interpreting and how interpreters are essential for ensuring good health outcomes so essentially what happened was in 1980 um a young man was brought to an emergency room at 1:00 a.m. 1:00 a.m. in

1:49 the morning and he was unconscious and he was brought U by the ambulance and the family tried very hard to explain that the patient was intoxicado and intoxicado in Spanish does not mean intoxicated at least in Cuban Spanish it's what we call a false cognate it sounds like it should mean the same thing but it really doesn't exactly it's a false cognate that's right it sounds like they're saying he was intoxicated and in fact um one of the family members anglicized it and she actually used the word in English intoxicated so they were alternately using the word intoxicado and intoxicated so you can see how it is

2:35 that the medical professionals became confused and what did they really mean to say well it's kind of a funny story in that that afternoon Willie had had a hamburger a fast food hamburger from Wendy's and this very conservative Cuban family thought that when he fell down unconscious it was because he had eaten a fast food hamburger see that's what happens when you eat out of out of our house and you go to a fast food place you fall down unconscious I mean it's actually kind of comical they thought he was food poisoned and that caused him to fall down unconscious so they were in saying that he was intoxicado intoxicado means food poisoned or it actually means that you are sick because of something that was toxic to your

3:21 system so that's what they were trying to explain MH now the emergency room physician looked at an unconscious Hispanic male of an 18-year-old unconscious Hispanic male with a family that was explaining that he was what they thought what the emergency room physician thought was intoxicated M so of course for him it made sense that this patient was was it had taken a drug overdose the other part of the story was that um Will's girlfriend was 15 at the time and she mentioned in p ing that she and Willie had been arguing that day so the emergency room physician put

4:06 together a story that was completely false essentially he thought that because of the argument that Willie had had with his girl friend that he had taken an intentional drug overdose and the diagnosis that he put on the emergency room form was probable intentional drug overdose