Triaphon

Imagine you are abroad and have an acute medical problem. You will go to the emergency department of the nearest hospital, but you will not be able to communicate with the nurses at the registration desk or with the doctors there.

This scenario is experienced daily by people in hospitals in our country and worldwide; mostly people with a refugee background or a recent migraton are affected. These situations lead to great frustration on the part of the patients, their relatives and the clinic staff. Sufficient quality of medical care cannot be ensured without effective communication. As young doctors from the fields of paediatrics and general medicine, we face these challenges every day.

We have therefore decided to take action and have set up a non-profit telephone interpreting service for the emergency department. The special feature is that our service is available around the clock and a connection is established without delay. There are no technical hurdles, so that our service can also be used for very short telephone calls, for example during triage by the nursing staff.

The target groups of the project are people with a flight background or immigrant background, hospital staff and all language mediators. Our primary concern is to offer cost-effective, high-quality and constantly available language translations for people with an escape background in acute medical care. In the long term, we aim for independent financing, language development, further training for language mediators and an expansion of the user base. We also want to further expand the exchange and networking opportunities of our highly committed Triaphon community.

The commitment of the language mediators, partly due to their own experience of the language barrier, is remarkable. At the regular networking meetings, there is always a lively exchange between language mediators from different cultures. Seeing the relief and gratitude that patients can give us in emergency situations is a huge motivation for everyone involved. On the part of the clinic staff, we have observed a clearly more positive mood towards people with an escape background since the introduction of the project. The project thus indirectly counteracts prejudices, builds up new networks and removes (language) barriers.

Any financial support allows us to come a little closer to these visions. ;-) In concrete terms, this includes:

Financing of language development: A number of other languages are currently being developed. This is associated with a high organizational effort and costs. New Triaphon language mediators are trained at information meetings and by our team and receive an allowance for their voluntary work.
Financing of further training and further education courses for our language translators.
Expansion of the Triaphon community: In the future we would like to continue organizing Meetups of the Triaphon community with new interested parties, supporters and clinic staff. So far they have only taken place in Hamburg and Berlin, in the future we would like to meet you also at other places in Germany regularly for exchange!
Technical expansion: Triaphon was programmed with the highest commitment of a team of volunteer programmers and a UX designer. Now we need funds to further expand the system (the telephone system). In addition, Triaphon is to be made even more user-friendly for our language mediators.
Strengthening of the team: Due to the pleasingly high popularity of the Triaphon idea, our small and highly motivated team has a lot to do. Financial support for the further expansion of the team would help us a lot.