An aspiring doctor, Samuel Yousefzai has volunteered with several home health agencies that help patients in their homes. During one visit, he said he was helping a nurse who was struggling to communicate with an Assyrian patient.
The Roycemore School senior, who is also Assyrian and has experience translating for his great-grandparents, offered to help.
“I ended up translating for them, and I was able to see how much better the meeting was able to go,” Yousefzai said. “I think communication is one of the most important things. Not only is it important for the patient to understand what the nurse’s instructions are, it’s also important for the patient to be able to describe what they’re feeling.”
After helping that patient, Yousefzai said he realized he could use his translation skills to eliminate language barriers in medicine –– a field he is passionate about.
“That patient I met was when I realized that this is the way I should be helping out because I truly believe that that patient would not have gotten even half the care he needed if it wasn’t for that communication barrier being broken,” he said.
So, he created nonprofit organization Bridge the Gap Interpreting in 2020 to pair translators with patients through the home health agencies he had worked with.
Yousefzai said he contacted people he knew who spoke various languages. He said he wanted to recruit translators from the agencies he worked for because they understood healthcare.
Juliet Ashuty, one of those translators, speaks five languages: Assyrian, Farsi, Turkish, Armenian and English.
She said she thinks interpreting for patients is more than just getting them medical help –– it’s prioritizing and building relationships with patients.
“We want to help them,” Ashuty said. “We want to talk to them, we want to help them with their problems.”
For his work with Bridge the Gap, Yousefzai was named the Youth Philanthropist of the Year in 2022 by state Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.).
Mark Terrado, whom Yousefzai describes as a mentor, was especially proud. Terrado, a nurse, said it is important to put care into the “language the patient understands” to build trust between the interpreter and the patient.
Terrado said Yousefzai’s first-hand experience through Bridge the Gap will make him a better person and physician.
Now, Yousefzai said he plans to expand Bridge the Gap to the national level.
“So many patients across the country who are under those agencies, they do not have proper translators,” he said. “So, we can get as many translators as we want, and we can try to help it.”
Yousefzai’s ultimate goal is to break language barriers in healthcare. The success of Bridge the Gap in the Chicago area demonstrates that it is possible to achieve the goal on a national level, he said.
Yousefzai is currently researching how obesity is shaped by different social factors like race and gender. He hopes to apply the research skills he learns to his work battling language obstacles in the healthcare system.
This work is important to Yousefzai because it helps him solve the problem at its roots instead of simply trimming it down.
“I’m cutting the branch(es) as much as I can,” he said. “There’s a little problem here, I try to fix it. Little problem here, I try to fix it, but I cannot keep that on forever. I believe (by) looking in the main issue of asking yourself ‘why is this an issue?’ we can help stop language barriers in healthcare.”
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