How to get a free interpreter for aged care

If English is not your first language, or not the language you are most comfortable in when the subject is your own body and your own money, you are entitled to an interpreter for your aged care assessment and your dealings with providers. It is free to you, and it is arranged by the service you are speaking to.

Plenty of families never find that out. They bring a bilingual adult child instead, and the appointment quietly becomes harder than it needed to be.

This is general information, not advice. What is available to you personally should be confirmed with My Aged Care.

Ask before the appointment, not on the day

The single most useful thing you can do is name the language when you first make contact, before anyone books a time. Interpreter availability is what sets the appointment slot, so a request made at the start costs you nothing and a request made on the day usually costs you a rebooking.

When you call My Aged Care, you can say what language you need and they will bring an interpreter onto the call. Their contact details, and the other national numbers worth having, are on our aged care contacts and hotlines page.

Two practical points:

• Name the language and the dialect. “Arabic” and “Levantine Arabic” are not the same booking. Neither are Mandarin and Cantonese, or Assyrian and Chaldean.
• Say whether you want the interpreter on the phone or in the room. For a face to face assessment at home, an interpreter in the room is usually easier for an older person to follow. Phone interpreting is faster to arrange. Ask for what suits the person, not what suits the diary.

What happens at the assessment

The assessment itself does not change because there is an interpreter present. What changes is the pace, and that is a good thing. See how to get a My Aged Care assessment for what the conversation covers.

A few things make the hour work better:

Speak to the assessor, not the interpreter. It feels unnatural for about two minutes and then it stops feeling like anything. The interpreter is not part of the conversation, they are carrying it.

Talk in short pieces. Two or three sentences, then a pause. Long uninterrupted stretches get summarised, and summary is where detail goes missing.

Say when you have not understood. Not “yes”. If a word has been translated in a way that does not make sense to you, say that the word does not make sense. Interpreters expect this and would much rather be stopped.

Let the interpreter interpret everything. Including the parts you find embarrassing, and including the side comment your son makes in English. Anything not interpreted is a gap in the record.

Why we do not ask family to interpret

Using a family member seems easier and often it is not, for three reasons.

The first is vocabulary. Your daughter may be perfectly fluent in English and still have no idea how to say “continence aid” or “means assessment” in the language her mother thinks in. Aged care is full of terms that people do not use in ordinary life. Our Support at Home glossary exists because they are hard enough in one language.

The second is that she cannot do both jobs at once. While she is interpreting she is not listening as a daughter, not noticing what her mother left out, and not asking the questions she came to ask.

The third is the subject matter. Showering, toileting, memory, money and what happens if you fall are all on the agenda. Many people will not say the true answer to those questions through their own child, and the assessment is then built on a polite version of the truth.

Bring family for support. Bring an interpreter for language. They are different jobs.

What to do if nobody offers one

Ask. Directly, and of the person in front of you: “I would like an interpreter for this, can you arrange one.”

If the answer is no, or the appointment goes ahead without one and you did not agree to that, you have two places to go. A free independent aged care advocate can take it up on your behalf, which is what advocates are for. You can also raise it with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, which handles concerns about aged care services.

Neither of those is an argument. Both are ordinary.

How this works with Aldera

Language sits in your One Story, which is the record every person who comes to your home reads before they arrive. It holds the language you prefer, the dialect, whether an interpreter is needed for phone calls, and who in the family to call if a message needs to land properly.

Your Care Lead arranges interpreting for the conversations we are part of, so nobody has to ask twice, and your Care Circle is matched with language in mind where we can. What that looks like in practice is on our languages and cultural care page, and there is a longer piece on culturally matched care in practice.

The point of all of it is small and not very romantic. You should be able to say what you actually mean, on your own terms, about your own life.