National Code of Ethics

Written by: The National Council on Interpreting in Health Care

As the profession of health care interpreting in the United States matures and evolves, the importance of creating shared understandings of what is considered high quality and ethically appropriate principles and practices in the field becomes imperative. To this end, the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC) identified steps that needed to take place on a national level in order to standardize the expectations that the health care industry and patients should have of interpreters and to raise the quality of health care interpreting. The first step was to publish the results of five years of consultation regarding the appropriate role(s) for interpreters in health care. A single Code of Ethics was then created that would guide the practice of interpreters working in health care venues. (NCIHC, 2004)

The Standards, Training and Certification (STC) Committee of the NCIHC took on the task of bringing the first step to fruition. The goal of the STC Committee was to create a national code of ethics that would provide the growing profession with a set of shared, essential guiding principles expressing what are considered morally appropriate behaviors for its practitioners as they perform their day-to-day duties.

To achieve this goal, the STC Committee, with partial funding from the Federal Office of Minority Health (OMH), engaged in a systematic process of reviewing existing codes of ethics, creating a draft code, conducting national focus groups to review the draft, and eliciting feedback through a national survey. The challenge was to design a code that built on and solidified existing work at the same time that it expanded upon this work to ensure its relevance to all health care interpreters, irrespective of the languages or particular venue in which they were working.

The STC Committee started by identifying and collecting existing codes of ethics in health care and other related areas such as legal and sign language interpreting. This process surfaced a number of codes that were already in use at the local level – by state and national associations of interpreters, institutions of health care, interpreter service organizations, and court programs – in the United States and Canada. The STC Committee then focused on ten codes that were considered most relevant to their work and compared them in order to identify the elements that were held in common and to analyze how each approached those issues that were most difficult and controversial in the field. Based on its analysis, the STC Committee drafted a code that included the elements shared across these existing codes as well as a few that were controversial but relevant.

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National Standards of Practice

Written by: The National Council on Interpreting in Health Care

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters (CCHI) will use the National Standards of Practice for Interpreters in Health Care, developed by the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC), as the foundation for CCHI's national certification program for healthcare interpreters.  The introduction that follows to the National Standards of Practice for Interpreters in Health Care explains the context in which the standards were developed, describes the process of development, and suggests ways in which the standards can be used. 

In 2004, the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC) published the National Code of Ethics for Interpreters in Health Care. Development of the Code of Ethics followed an extensive period of gathering input and counsel from working interpreters and their colleagues. Through a similar consensus-building process, the NCIHC developed a set of standards of practice for interpreters working in health care settings. The project built on the work in standards development at the individual state level, specifically on the pioneering work of the Massachusetts Medical Interpreters Association (MMIA) and the California Healthcare Interpreting Association (CHIA). While NCIHC reviewed the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf standards of practice (RID) and received input from American Sign Language interpreters, NCIHC's focus and expertise lies in spoken language interpreting and therefore these standards represent a consensus on standards for spoken language interpreters.

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Other Standards:
CHIA's Standards for Healthcare Interpreters
IMIA's Medical Interpreting Standards of Practice
ASTM's Standard Guide for Language Interpretation Services
HIN Canada's National Standard Guide for Community Interpreting Services
RID's Standard Practice Papers