There are four main components to the language services offered by VHIO: interpreters at clinics, community outreach events, screening events, and online document translations.
Please refer to our Events page for more details and information about our volunteering events.
Document translations that we typically complete include community outreach posters, PowerPoint slides, clinic publicity flyers, surveys, consent forms, and screening result letters.
VHIO Language Capacities
Since VHIO began as SFHBC, we originally focused on the API population, which is disproportionately affected by hepatitis B: 10% of U.S. APIs chronically infected with the virus, and APIs constituting 50% of hepatitis B-related deaths in the U.S. VHIO currently provides healthcare interpretation (spoken) and translation (written) in Cantonese, Mandarin, Khmer, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. As we expand beyond hepatitis B to provide services for all areas of healthcare, we aim to be more comprehensive in serving limited English proficient (LEP) populations across the Bay Area.
Reaching out to help more communities, we plan to establish more language groups in the future depending on demands and needs.
Situated in a community with rich resources of diverse cultures and languages, UC Berkeley, with its large population of bilingual undergraduate students, provides VHIO a solid foundation to serving the LEP communities in the Bay Area. We also welcome any passionate and fluent bilingual speakers from the community to join VHIO.
Training
Please refer to our DeCal Page for more information.
Assessment and Research
In our ongoing efforts improve our services, we are collecting data via surveys and statistics to assess the effectiveness of our interpreters. The research project began as Casey Tsai’s (Director 2010-2011) public health honors thesis, and will be continued by the Programs Analyst. The conclusions from data up to May 2011 is as follows:
Trained volunteer student interpreters like VHIO at UC Berkeley can fill important gaps in providing linguistically and culturally competent care in California. By recruiting and training bilingual students who share the same languages and similar cultural background with the LEP populations in the community, VHIO provides a sustainable workforce of free and highly qualified interpreters for grass-roots preventive interventions and outreach events to specific LEP populations in their cultural communities.
Please join us in our campaign to break language barriers!