Showing Quiet Signs of Communication : Interpreters: Program at Santa Ana hospital helps deaf or hearing-impaired patients clearly understand what their physicians are saying.

Gloria Ching never thought she would feel relaxed enough to be able to laugh and joke during a visit to her doctor’s office.

Ching, 43, who has been deaf since infancy, said such visits would normally be filled with anxious and sometimes agonizing moments as she looked at her doctor and wondered, “Will this hurt?” or “What exactly is wrong with me?”

But during recent surgery at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana and a follow-up appointment with her doctor, much of Ching’s usual frustration and fear disappeared.

It was interpreter Alicia Speare who made the difference, using sign language to explain to her in great detail what medical procedures she would face and how she could expect to feel.

“It makes me feel so much more comfortable,” Ching said in sign language. “In the past, there have been so many misunderstandings. Writing notes is such a waste of time. It’s hard for us because some of the medical words we don’t know.”

Ching is one of dozens of deaf and hearing-impaired patients who have used the hospital’s Special Task Interpreters for the Deaf program, which was recently launched to help bridge the communication gap.

The service, which is free to patients, provides specially trained interpreters who are on hand before, during and after surgery, during follow-up appointments and for such programs as physical therapy, lab tests and Lamaze classes. The interpreter program is based at the Santa Ana facility and is not shared with Western Medical Center-Anaheim.

“With the assistance of an interpreter, a patient can comprehend what is going on,” said Speare, the program director. “Our goal is to bring ease, speed and accuracy to the conversation between the health care professional and the hearing-impaired patient. This provides for a more accurate diagnosis for the physician and a clearer understanding for the patient.”

Hospital officials said that before the interpreter program, their success in communicating with deaf or hearing-impaired patients was often “hit-and-miss” and interpreters were called in on an as-needed basis.

Through the program, the hospital now has five interpreters on call around the clock, telephone devices for the deaf and closed-captioned television in hospital rooms.

“We felt it was a need that wasn’t being serviced as well as it could have been,” said Andrea Kofl, hospital administrator. “This program makes us more proactive, and we can go out into the deaf community and say: ‘We will be ready for you.’ ”

Even the presence of a relative or friend who knows sign language isn’t as helpful as having a specially trained interpreter who can explain medical terms and diagnoses, Speare said.

“The interpreters are a great help to us, because it is our responsibility to make sure that a patient understands,” said Mary Lou Cozza, a registered nurse at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana, who helped prepare Ching for surgery.

Speare, a veteran interpreter, said she decided to start the program after hearing countless horror stories from deaf patients about even the most routine medical procedures.

“I was very frustrated with the care deaf patients were getting from the medical community,” Speare said. “I was finding that people were going into surgery and not really comprehending why.”

Speare remembers a misunderstanding when an elderly man who was having trouble breathing was told that doctors would need to insert a catheter through his leg to his heart. The man became hysterical because he thought doctors were going to have to amputate his leg.

“Once an interpreter arrived, it was all straightened out, and the man realized that his heart problem had nothing to do with his leg,” she said.

Another patient Speare helped had been taking medication for epileptic seizures since he was 6, but never knew why he had to take the pills and didn’t find out until he suffered a major seizure as an adult.

“When he had the seizure, he had no idea what was happening to him,” Speare said. “He thought he was having a stroke.

“There have also been instances in which people were mistaking a cyst for a tumor and assuming it was cancer. The word cyst is not common for them. All they see is a lump, and they don’t get the auditory input that a hearing person would get.”

Speare and other officials who work with the deaf and hearing-impaired said more programs like the interpreters program are needed in the county.

“There really is such a need,” said Terri Howell, communications director for the Dayle McIntosh Center in Anaheim. “The fact that the hospital is willing to do this is really commendable. It’s a wonderful thing to have an interpreter on call at all times.”

“The more programs like this, the better,” said Donald Nuernberger, director of the Orange County Deaf Equal Access Foundation in Buena Park.