ESLs

OK, this is a vent. It is not meant to be politically incorrect, and please note that I am not saying ESLs are not American. Many are offshore, of course. But I realize we have primary English speaking Americans and English as second language Americans, MTs and medical providers, and all are citizens of the U.S., and that is wonderful and I have no issue with that.

But I am just so fed up with seeing ESL's posting on transcription forums and elsewhere who cannot speak English, asking how to get started in the business. NO. You cannot do this job if you are not excellent at grammar, excellent at English in general and English medical language in particular. NO, you cannot learn it all from a course and spellcheck will not save you!!

If you cannot even write a post on a forum or an email with any semblance of correct English, WHY do you think you can do medical transcription for English-speaking providers??

You know what ?? The MTSOs will probably hire you because they have a system whereby the primary English speakers will audit your work to some extent. But this whole ridiculous concept has driven all our once fair pay down to nothing.

Someone once told me that where we dropped the ball as an industry was in NOT standing up for ourselves back when AHDI first supported ESLs in transcription. AHDI (called something else back then, I forget) (AAMT?) did not stand up for American MTs and say this is a profession requiring professional-level skills in grammar, medical language, anatomy and physiology IN ENGLISH, and no, non-primary-English-speakers simply cannot do it well. VR cannot do it without our help either!!! That is why we pay MTs what they are worth!! They did not say: This is reality, and we need to find a certification system NOW to make sure we guard the integrity of this profession.

No. Instead, we dropped the ball and somewhere along the way everyone has come to think that ILP/ESL's/VR can do this work as well as primary English language speaking MT's .

I am so sick of it. It is not true now and it was not true then. VR is irrelevant. VR is not any better than the average ESL!!!

When will the industry recognize that English-speaking MT's have skills that are valuable and irreplaceable to English medical providers and cannot be offshored? that simply cannot be done well by ESL's without a solid grasp of English? that cannot be replaced by VSR?? Maybe someday, but certainly not now.

And I'll tell you something else.... if you are an ESL, trying to decipher the rushed, muffled, broken English of an ESL physician is going to be twice as hard for you as it is for a primary speaker, and it is a nightmare for us too!!! Not just deciphering it, but converting it into a document that is grammatically and medically accurate to 99.6% of our ability in an audit. Do you know how hard that is? And you know what? The MTSOs stick us with those accounts because they know it will be too hard for the ESLs! How fair is that? Yeah, not fair.

Just so tired of the injustice of it all. NO you cannot do MT work well if you don't speak English well. And NO, unless you grew up in the US, in which case none of this applies to you, you probably don't speak English as well as you think you do!!

Why does no one recognize this?? Because WE did not stand up for ourselves! Because AHDI did not take a stand on this! Because the hospitals and physicians in America were misled by the MTSOs to think that you do not need to have a good grasp of the spoken and written English language to create a near-perfect English document.

Where is the logic? There is none, that's where. The MTSOs said, "Hey, wonder if we can offshore this industry for cheap labor?" and AHDI said, "Let's welcome our ILP sisters and brothers with open arms!" and we all sat dumbfounded. Blindsided.

I am just so sick of all the people who don't speak English asking how to get started as an MT. It is hard enough for a primary English speaker!! It was something to take pride in... being one of the few, even then, with a talent for good grammar and an eye for the slightest error, and then being able to do it all quickly. Nothing has changed, that is still our profession. Does anyone realize it is not even that easy to find this talent in the US?? How many high school students can spell when they graduate? No, there are a select group of us who do this well, who took an interest in the medical language, who are perfectionists willing to sit at a computer in the first place, who find 99.6% accuracy requirements a challenge and not a curse (most of the time anyway)! And we used to get paid decently for the skill it to do it!

We now correct VR, we now handle many more ESL physicians with thick accents, so if anything our skill level has been forced to increase a hundred fold in the past decade.

But where did our pay go? Right. We have gone from decent middle class wages to barely scraping by.

Thank you for listening! But if I could turn back time a decade, I would try to rally us all to stand up for the fact that what we do requires solid English skills. And I was one who back then would not have rallied! I thought the whole idea that an ESL could do our work was too ridiculous to ever be a threat!!

I was right! It was. And it happened anyway because... cheap. And because we check their work. But for a fraction of our old pay.

I just can't take it sometimes. The ESLs who come on the forums. They say "Any transcriptions opportunity out there? Who is hiring are profession?"

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ESLs - sm

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