A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry

ESL rule of thumb - Tin Ear

Posted: Nov 17, 2011

As American-born, English-speaking doctors are becoming the minority, I think all companies should openly state what percentage of ESL will be encountered in a new job and then ask 1 year of experience for each percentage of ESL; e.g. 40% ESL (the maximum I can personally tolerate) 4 years experience plus a differential in the line rate, too. What do y'all think?

Tin Ear - Profiling like this would not be helpful. - ESL is a broad term. sm

[ In Reply To ..]
I would say that the account I am on is 50% or more "ESL." There is 1 "ESL" doctor who is the worst of the worst. So much so, that he is assigned his own MT, and no one even transcribes his dictation when she is on vacation. When I attempted to do his reports in the past, there were as many blanks as there were words, which was expected. He is a danger to patient care and should not be allowed to dictate the way he does.

That being said, there are many other "ESL" physicians who I love transcribing for, and some even make extra effort to help the MT. When I think about the American, English-speaking doctors on the account, the "ESL" guys are much better dictators. They seem to care more. There are also a couple of American, English-speaking doctors who are a danger to patient care as well.

IMO, the term ESL is a very broad term and really in no way (most of the time) is an indication of a person's ability to dictate. I have found that it is an individual thing/style.

I agree.. - "ESL" has nothing to do with it.

[ In Reply To ..]
trash dictation is trash dictation no matter whose sloppy mouth it comes out of.

Completely agree!!! - ERMT

[ In Reply To ..]
I am fortunate enough to transcribe a lot of the same dictators. Some of my favorites are ESLs. The one that I would rather walk across hot coals than see her physician ID is an American, English speaking woman. I think she tries to see just how fast she can get through the dictation. She has absolutely no compassion for her patients and is a horrible dictator. I loathe transcribing her work and hope to never see her as a patient either.

ERMT - Old Pro

[ In Reply To ..]
I had a woman just like that. She was a good old American, a "Valley Girl," complete with, like, you know, the Valley Girl speak, only she must have had five cups of espresso before she started to dictate. We all laughed and called her "Muffy." This was at a very famous California University. I guess their quality control did not extend to teaching their docs how to dictate. I was very glad when I moved off that account.

Old Pro - ERMT

[ In Reply To ..]
Gag me with a spoon!!!

We have hired in a whole slew of NPs and I think they are all about 12 years old. They are all women and I think they all took dictating lessons from my favorite dictator. I think one of them inhales helium before she dictates.

ERMT - Old Pro

[ In Reply To ..]
Gag is right! When that hospital went away, we were actually happy. This woman was a dermatopathologist and thought she should be the queen of the world (or at least her sorority).....I have always hated Valley Speak anyway, and coming from a doc, this was too much. I do think NPs are just the worst. They cannot pronounce drug names, many of them are disorganized, and they seem to have no clue about transcription. My last hospital (a large teaching one) had tons of them and they made me nuts. Who, knows, maybe you are right about the helium! LOL!

Worked for a place that weighted dictation according to difficulty. - voted on by MTs

[ In Reply To ..]
We got to pick the ones we thought on 5 levels of difficulty, each weighted differently in ascending order as far as weighting differential. This put an incentive on doing the harder jobs. If you did not do hard jobs, you didn't make much incentive pay, but weighting the difficult ones made it where we wanted to get the more difficult reports and learn how to do them quickly. It was very amazing how well it worked.

Tin Ear - Old Pro

[ In Reply To ..]
I would much rather have an ESL that the good old American cardiologist I had for years who seemed to love eating carrots and celery while dictating.

Agree w/ Old Pro - justme

[ In Reply To ..]
I've had many absolutely horrid auths who are supposed to be English as primary, and yet I have several ESLs I love. Won't go into the profiling issue, but...if it walks like a duck...

Be very careful what you wish for..... - You might get it. No message

[ In Reply To ..]
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