While responding to a medical call for chest pain, the questions you will need to ask the patient are going through your head while en route. How long has this been going on? Any history of this type of pain? Ect. While this can be a stressful call for EMS it can be further complicated by language barriers that interrupt our ability to diagnose and treat these individuals.
It is very important that you understand your population and be prepared for these type of situations. It's not critical that all of your responders be fluent in 5 languages, but they should have the tools necessary to communicate on a basic level with the types of patients that they could come in contact with. For example: here is a Spanish to English document that is fairly well laid out. http://www.awcnet.org/documents/EMSSpanish.pdf
Other tools are local high school teachers and college professors that can provide training to your responders.
Training on treatments and procedures are important, but communicating to patients is just as important to the quality of care that they expect to receive.
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