Carlos Riobó and Adriana Espinosa lead a CCNY program to make cancer treatment for Mandarin-speaking New Yorkers more accessible by using student interpreters.
A cohort of City College of New York students is set to help make cancer treatment for Mandarin-speaking Chinese New Yorkers more accessible. This follows an approximately $200,000 fall 2022 pilot grant from the CCNY-MSKCC Partnership for Cancer Research, Education, and Community Outreach for a two-year pilot program led by CCNY faculty Carlos Riobó of the Division of Humanities and the Arts, and Adriana Espinosa of the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership.
The interdisciplinary project – which also includes participants from CCNY’s Division of Science and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC)--is titled “Interpreting to Increase access to Psycho-Oncology Care.” Its overarching aim is to improve the health and social outcomes of minority and underserved populations in the New York Metropolitan area, particularly immigrants with limited English proficiency.
“We are looking to create protocols for translating so that we’ll have student interpreters in the field who are fluent in Mandarin and English, at a time when members of Asian communities have suffered pandemic-related stigmatization” said Riobó, professor and immediate past chair of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures. “Students will be trained in the best practices of interpreting for cancer care, and they’re going to be translating and interpreting between the physician and the patient both in-person and via virtual medicine.”
Riobó is leading the recruitment of 15 City College students, both graduate and undergraduates, who will be trained as interpreters and/or transcribers. Most will come from the Asian Studies program and Riobó’s Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, with other recruits from CCNY’s Colin Powell School, Grove School of Engineering, and the CUNY School of Medicine at The City College.
A primary requirement is that the students be fluent in both Mandarin Chinese and English. Once trained in person at MSK they will be deployed via telemedicine to assist patients from all five boroughs of New York City.
According to Espinosa, associate professor of psychology, “a unique component of this fascinating project is that it brings together expertise across multiple fields, such as science, social science and humanities, and provides students with trailblazing skills that broaden their human capital.”
The roughly $200,000 U54 CCNY-MSKCC Partnership Pilot grant from a program aimed at increasing access to health care for immigrants and reducing existing socioeconomic and racial disparities in cancer prevention and care, continues CCNY’s participation in cancer work, deriving from a National Cancer Institute parent grant. A previous grant in 2016 enabled five CCNY undergraduates to study medical interpreting and learn about translational cancer health disparities.
The long-running CCNY- Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Partnership dates back to 2002. Two years ago, the collaboration, whose mission is to develop future cancer researchers, received a $14 million five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health.
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