Medical interpreting as a profession and as an activity is very different from one European country to another and the needs are constantly changing, with the migration patterns always modified by social, economic and political events. In other words, all the countries have to adapt so as to offer the best interpreting services possible to those in need. As a consequence, action is needed in the field of medical interpreting training regarding the following facts: on the one hand, Spanish and Italian universities providing such training very seldom offer Romanian courses (although the Romanian immigrant communities in these countries are among the most numerous); on the other hand, Romanian universities do not offer any medical interpreting course. All that in a context in which population movements – even with Romania as a destination – have kept intensifying during the last decade.
The lack of higher education training in medical interpreting is probably one of the reasons why ad hoc interpreters are often used when there are foreign-language speaking patients in Romanian, Italian and Spanish healthcare services, being very likely a negative impact on communication and clinical outcomes.
ReACTMe sets to offer a solution to this problem. The means to this end are: providing tools for training medical interpreters, training trainers and higher education learners and designing a curriculum of an extracurricular module on medical interpreting to be implemented at the participating institutions after the funding period.
The 6 participating institutions represent 3 countries with different migration experiences: UBB and UMF (Romania); UNIBO and UNINT (Italy); USJ and UMU (Spain).