Skip to main content
Key Specialties
Cardiology Diabetology Endocrinology Gastroenterology Geriatrics and Gerontology Gynecology and Obstetrics Hematology Infectious Disease Internal Medicine Nephrology Neurology Oncology Pediatrics Respiratory Medicine Rheumatology Surgery
Congress Coverage
2024 ACC Congress 2023 ESMO Congress 2023 EASD Congress 2023 ERS Congress 2023 ESC Congress 2023 EHA Congress 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting
Clinical Collections
Advances in Alzheimer’s

Keynote webinar | Spotlight on sleep in brain health

LIVE: Thursday 2nd May 2024, 18:00-19:30 (CEST)

Quality sleep is essential for health. But what happens to our brains when sleep patterns are disturbed? Join our experts to explore the interplay between sleep disruption and neurological diseases, and the questions that you need to be asking your patients to help you prevent the harmful effects of sleep deprivation.
ADVANCED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Health Care Analysis
Published in: Health Care Analysis 1/2017

01-03-2017 | Original Article

The Absent Interpreter in Administrative Detention Center Medical Units

Authors: Murielle Rondeau-Lutz, Jean-Christophe Weber

Published in: Health Care Analysis | Issue 1/2017

Login to get access

Abstract

The particular situation of the French administrative detention center (ADC) medical units appears to be an exemplary case to study the difficulties facing medical practice. Indeed, the starting point of our inquiry was an amazing observation that needed to be addressed and understood: why are professional interpreters so seldom requested in ADC medical units, where one would expect that they would be “naturally” present? Aiming to fully explore the meanings of the “absent interpreter”, this article takes into account the possible meanings of this situation: the recourse to professional interpreters in France is far from expected given cumulative evidence of its benefits; perceptions of illegal immigrants and medical habitus itself may both hamper the use of a third party; the ADCs are a very stressful place for healthcare professionals, with conflicting missions, political issues enmeshed with medical goals, and heavy affective burden that may lead to self-protection. Silencing voices of suffering others might be seen as the hidden indecent truth of the “absent interpreter”. These reflections open a window to a larger issue with regard to the full range of medicine: what are the place, the role and the function of patient’s words and narratives in contemporary medicine? The highly invested somatic perspective and its political corollary giving primacy to bare life harbor potential risks of obscuring speeches and undervaluing narratives.
Footnotes
1
This is alluded to in Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France Security, Territory and Population [28].
 
2
Décret n° 2001-236 du 19 mars 2001 relatif aux centres et locaux de rétention administrative [40].
 
3
Actually, “habitus” characterizes the way of reasoning and acting of all participants: habitus of detainees appears to be resignated; habitus of policiers appears to be suspicious…. The mere awareness of “habitus” of oneself and of the other is a necessary requirement for careful listening and enables critical self-reflexiveness.
 
4
This perception of danger, which may be life-threatening, opposes the governmental notion of a “safe country” that allows the fears of nationals deported to the countries they fled to be deemed unfounded.
 
5
In a certain manner, keeping a distance is an official order, which objectively is a paradoxical injunction due to the fact that the organization of a healthcare service in the ADC is no less official.
 
6
The increasing issue of health and disease as grounds to exercise rights is not completely new. It is of note that this issue had been already encountered during the First World War. Painful electric shocks were administered for all “war neuroses”, although simulators looking to leave the battlefield were but a small minority of them [29].
 
7
Agamben [1] has proposed to consider biopolitics from another, more structural, angle. According to him, natural life (zoe) is normally inseparable from a particular form of life in actual living conditions (bios), which means a socially and politically qualified life. Nevertheless, life itself, so called ‘bare life’, is also politicized. Agamben claims that there is a special link etween sovereign power—extended now to medical power—and bare life, and that this link is the “hidden matrix” of modern political space, Probably he would consider ADC as a particular space where bare life tends to be separated from bios.
 
8
According to Levinas [45], the other calls in question the subject: “It is the revelation of a resistance to my powers that does not counter them as a greater force, but calls in question the naïve right of my powers”.
 
Literature
1.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer, I. Sovereign power and bare life (Italian ed. 1995). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Bernardot, M. (2009). Une tempête sous un CRA. Violences et protestations dans les centres de rétention administrative français en 2008. Multitudes, 35, 215–224.CrossRef
6.
Bernstein, J., Bernstein, E., Dave, A., Hardt, E., James, T., Linden, J., et al. (2002). Trained medical interpreters in the emergency department: Effects on services, subsequent charges, and follow-up. Journal of Immigrant Health, 4(4), 171–176.CrossRefPubMed
7.
Blake, M. (2013). Immigration, jurisdiction and exclusion. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 41(2), 103–130.CrossRef
8.
Blum, A. (2010). Impact de l’interprétariat comme outil de communication pour les patients non francophones en consultation. A propos d’une étude prospective menée aux Hôpitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg en 2008. Unpublished thesis, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.
9.
Boucekkine, S. (2010). Mise à disposition d’interprètes professionnels en cabinet de médecine libérale. Unpublished thesis, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.
10.
Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
11.
Brossat, A. (2010). Droit à la vie?. Paris: Seuil.
12.
13.
Carde, E. (2007). Les discriminations selon l’origine dans l’accès aux soins. Santé Publique, 19(2), 99–109.CrossRefPubMed
14.
15.
16.
17.
Clarke, A. E., Shim, J. K., Marno, L., Fosket, J. R., & Fishman, J. R. (2003). Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and US biomedicine. American Sociological Review, 68(2), 161–194.CrossRef
18.
Enjolras, F. (2009). Soigner en centre de rétention administrative. Une question de légitimité? Hommes et Migrations, 1282, 76–88.CrossRef
19.
Esscher, A., Binder-Finnema, P., Bødker, B., Högberg, U., Mulic-Lutvica, A., & Essén, B. (2014). Suboptimal care and maternal mortality among foreign-born women in Sweden: Maternal death audit with application of the ‘migration three delays’ model. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 14, 141.CrossRefPubMedPubMedCentral
20.
Fassin, D., & d’Halluin, E. (2005). The truth in the body. Medical certificate as ultimate evidence for asylum-seekers. American Anthropologist, 107(4), 597–608.CrossRef
21.
Fassin, D., & Rechtman, R. (2009). The empire of trauma: An inquiry into the condition of victimhood (French ed. 2007). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
22.
Fassin, D. (2011). Humanitarian reason. A moral history of the present (French ed. 2010). Berkeley: University of California Press.
23.
Fischer, N. (2009). Jeux de regards. Surveillance disciplinaire et contrôle associatif dans les centres de rétention administrative. Genèses, 75, 45–65.CrossRef
24.
Fischer, N. (2005). Clandestins au secret. Contrôle et circulation de l’information dans les centres de rétention administrative français. Cultures & Conflits, 57, 91–118.CrossRef
25.
Flores, G. (2005). The impact of interpreters medical service on the quality of health care: A systematic review. Medical Care Research and Review, 62(3), 255–299.CrossRefPubMed
26.
27.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. London: Penguin.
28.
Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (French ed. 2004). New York: Picador.
29.
Freud, S. (1920). Rapport d’expert sur le traitement électrique des névrosés de guerre. In S. Freud (Ed.), Résultats, Idées, Problèmes, I (pp. 249–253). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
30.
31.
Geiger, H. J. (2001). Racial stereotyping and medicine: The need for cultural competence. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 164(12), 1699–1700.PubMedPubMedCentral
32.
Gelhaus, P. (2012). The desired moral attitude of the physician: (I) Empathy. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 15(2), 103–113.CrossRef
33.
Gelhaus, P. (2012). The desired moral attitude of the physician: (II) Compassion. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 15(4), 397–410.CrossRef
34.
35.
Henry, S. G. (2006). Recognizing tacit knowledge in medical epistemology. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 27(3), 187–213.CrossRefPubMed
36.
Hofmann, B. (2003). Medicine as Techne—A perspective from antiquity. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 28(4), 403–425.CrossRefPubMed
37.
Hudelson, P., & Vilpert, S. (2009). Overcoming language barriers with foreign-language speaking patients: A survey to investigate intra-hospital variation in attitudes and practices. BMC Health Service Research, 9, 187.CrossRef
38.
39.
40.
41.
Karliner, L., Jacobs, E., Chen, A., & Mutha, S. (2007). Do professional interpreters improve clinical care for patients with limited english proficiency? A systematic review of the literature. Health Services Research, 42, 727–754.CrossRefPubMedPubMedCentral
42.
Ku, L., & Flores, G. (2005). Pay now or pay later: Providing interpreter services in health care. Health Affairs, 24(2), 435–444.CrossRefPubMed
43.
Larchanché, S. (2012). Intangible obstacles: Health implications of stigmatization, structural violence, and fear among undocumented immigrants in France. Social Science and Medicine, 74(6), 858–863.CrossRefPubMed
44.
Leccia, C. (2008). Les difficultés de la pratique de la médecine générale dans les Unités Médicales des Centres de Rétention Administrative. Unpublished thesis, University of Nice, Nice, France.
45.
Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et infini, Essai sur l’extériorité. La Haye: M. Nijhoff.
46.
Levinas, E. (1978). Otherwise than being or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Kluwer (first edition in French 1974, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. La Haye: M. Nijhoff).
47.
Makaremi, C. (2008). Pénalisation de la circulation et reconfigurations de la frontière: le maintien des étrangers en «zone d’attente». Cultures & Conflits, 71, 55–73.CrossRef
48.
Mc Neill, P. (2003). Public health ethics: Asylum seekers and the case for political action. Bioethics, 17(5–6), 487–503.CrossRef
49.
Meylaerts, R. (2009). «Et pour les Flamands, la même chose»: Quelle politique de traduction pour quelles minorités linguistiques? Meta: Translators’ Journal, 54(1), 7–21.CrossRef
50.
Milner, J. C. (2011). La politique des choses. Court traité politique 1. Lagrasse: Verdier.
51.
Milner, J. C. (2011). Pour une politique des êtres parlants. Court traité politique 2. Lagrasse: Verdier.
52.
Mohr, E. (2010). L’interprétariat professionnel en milieu hospitalier, enquête auprès de 164 médecins usagers de ce service. Unpublished thesis, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France.
53.
54.
Nerson, G. (1999). Doctors of the world’s internal report, October 1999. Unpublished technical report, Médecins du Monde, Paris, France.
55.
56.
Pellegrino, E. D. (1979). Toward a reconstruction of medical morality: The primacy of the act of profession and the fact of illness. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 4(1), 32–56.CrossRefPubMed
57.
Ricoeur, P. (1991). Préface à Médecins tortionnaires, médecins résistants. In Lectures 1. Paris: Seuil.
58.
59.
Rosenberg, E., Seller, R., & Leanza, Y. (2008). Through interpreters’eyes: Comparing roles of professional and family intepreters. Patient Education and Counseling, 70(1), 87–93.CrossRefPubMed
60.
61.
Sayad, A. (2003). The suffering of the immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press (French ed. 1999).
62.
Suurmond, J., Uiters, E., de Bruijne, M. C., Stronks, K., & Essink-Bot, M.-L. (2011). Negative health care experiences of immigrant patients: A qualitative study. BMC Health Services Research, 11(10). doi:10.​1186/​1472-6963-11-10.
63.
Tiemersma, D. (1987). Ontology and ethics in the foundation of medicine and the relevance of Levinas’view. Theoretical Medicine, 8(2), 127–133.CrossRefPubMed
64.
65.
Tyreman, S. (2000). Promoting critical thinking in health care: Phronesis and criticality. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 3(2), 117–124.CrossRef
66.
Vanni, M. (2004). L’impatience des réponses: L’éthique d’Emmanuel Levinas au risque de son inscription pratique. Paris: Cerf.
67.
Weber, J.-C. (2012). Pleasure in medical practice. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 15(2), 153–164.CrossRef
Metadata
Title
The Absent Interpreter in Administrative Detention Center Medical Units
Authors
Murielle Rondeau-Lutz
Jean-Christophe Weber
Publication date
01-03-2017
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Health Care Analysis / Issue 1/2017
Print ISSN: 1065-3058
Electronic ISSN: 1573-3394
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-014-0285-4

Other articles of this Issue 1/2017

Health Care Analysis 1/2017 Go to the issue

Original Article

For the Sake of Justice: Should We Prioritize Rare Diseases?

Original Article

Intimacy and Sexuality in Institutionalized Dementia Care: Clinical-Ethical Considerations

Original Article

Ageism and Autonomy in Health Care: Explorations Through a Relational Lens

Original Article

How Does Organisational Literacy Impact Access to Health Care for Homeless Individuals?

Original Article

The (Ir)relevance of Group Size in Health Care Priority Setting: A Reply to Juth