Within the next hour, Sudesna had signs that the website was “spreading like wildfire”. Another sister, who is a paediatrician, also passed the word around. She sent it out to five friends who were doctors, and to her sister’s colleagues in the emergency department. It was 11am when the site was ready to go.
She also decided to add instructions in Bengali on how to monitor one’s own blood pressure and maintain good personal hygiene. Sudesna created a contact list of some 13 volunteer translators she knew – mostly childhood friends – and devised a rostering system. “The world is very quiet at 5am, so there was no background noise,” Sudesna said with a laugh.įifty audio files later, each matched to the relevant translation, the website was 90 per cent ready. Sudesna had two goals for the portal – one, for frontliners to be able to conduct the first consultation with a patient without needing an interpreter and two, for them to be able to contact an interpreter directly without a middle-man.īy 5am, she was ready to record audio translations, which would come in helpful should the worker be illiterate. Never mind that she had zero experience, or that it was 3am. So after consulting with two friends working on the frontlines, Sudesna decided to build a website that would make translations easily accessible to all the medical care teams. Alexandra Hospital needed help with clinical consultations and remote video calls with migrant worker patients.
READ: COVID-19: All foreign worker dormitories to have medical teams of doctors and nurses from hospitals, polyclinicsĪmong the hospitals, the call for interpreters had gone out earlier. Interpreters and translators would be needed in all these places. “I wouldn’t wish for any doctor to say that patient care was compromised because of a communication error.”Īnd the need was urgent: That same evening, it was announced that medical teams would be deployed to all dormitories within the week. Meanwhile, community isolation facilities like the Singapore Expo were also filling up with migrant workers. There had to be a faster, easier way to communicate with these patients, Sudesna thought. Even their parents were roped in as more translation requests came in. Her sister, an emergency doctor, would send voice messages of medical terms in Bengali for her colleagues. If she was not on the phone assisting doctors attending to Bangladeshi patients, she was helping medical facilities to translate sets of instructions into Bengali.
The 24-year-old Singaporean could not sleep that night, knowing that even more migrant workers were bound to be needing medical care.Īlready in the past week, the recent graduate of the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine had been volunteering as a Bengali interpreter. SINGAPORE: It was midnight on Tuesday (Apr 14) when a sense of dread filled Sudesna Roy Chowdhury as she absorbed the breaking news: A record number of new COVID-19 cases in Singapore, with the vast majority of linked cases coming from foreign worker dormitories.