In order to enable the translation feature you need to fill out this form, or contact support@accurx.com so we can turn it on for you. It’s not on by default as we want to make sure practices have the appropriate workflows and governance in place to deal with requests from patients in languages other than English.

Once turned on, patients will be able to translate the patient triage pages by selecting one of the 11 available languages (10 most frequent languages in England + Wales) by using the dropdown on the form:

All sections of the Patient Triage form are then translated via machine translation to the selected language (please see FAQ’s below for more details on this), allowing a patient to submit a request in their own language. Here is an example in Italian:

When the patient selects a language there is a disclaimer pop up which says...

...in the chosen language, to allow patients to make an informed decision about whether they want to continue using the translated form or contact their GP by the usual means.

The patient can submit a request in their chosen language to the practice.

The practice receives the patient’s request in the inbox as usual, but in language the patient has used to answer the questions.

Patient Triage requests in which the patient has translated the form into another language will display a new field: “Patient has translated form to: xxx”, which will indicate the language the patient translated the form to.

Practices can then decide how to translate and/or action the request received into the practice according to their own workflows and processes.

Whilst the patient submission will display in the Accurx Inbox in the chosen language, we have identified that the medical record may not support certain characters (such as non-latin characters). We therefore advise that submissions in other languages are not saved to the record using the “save to record” feature in the Accurx inbox.

For our first iteration, we chose translation into the top ten main languages spoken in England and Wales (plus English and Welsh) based on the 2021 ONS census. The aim is to improve accessibility for patients where English is not their first language and allow more patients to read and complete the Patient Triage form in their primary language.

The languages we currently support are: Polish, Romanian, Punjabi, Urdu, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati and Italian.

We have opted to use automated (machine) translation software in our products because it allows the entirety of the Patient Triage form to be translated - organisations using Patient Triage are able to customise several parts of the form which may include important instructions or safety netting advice for patients, which wouldn’t have been amenable to manual (human) translation.

Microsoft Azure was chosen as the software provider for translation because they are an existing supplier for Accurx that has passed our assurance processes for data security and have security compliance certification, such as ISO27001.

Translator by Azure is a secure cloud-based text translation API which allows a range of automated translations for a wide range of languages. This tool will only be used to translate the Patient Triage form, meaning that no patient personal or sensitive data will be processed through this tool.

Although Translator by Azure is one of the main cloud providers of cloud translation services, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the translation of the Patient Triage form. Implementing the translation feature is at a risk of the practice and users, balancing this functionality with the needs of their patients (who will also be surfaced the patient-facing disclaimer mentioned above).

If an organisation decides to enable this feature, it is their responsibility to ensure that they have appropriate means of understanding and actioning these responses. We envision that practices will have staff that speak another language or will use a translation service or interpreter to make best use of this feature.

Currently, the translation feature is binary, when the feature is on, patients will be able to translate the form into the 11 languages we specified. The distribution of the percentage of people who have a non-English/Welsh primary language is not uniform across the country, meaning our chosen top languages may not always be the top languages of a particular area. Whilst we offer a limited range of languages, it makes sense to take a generic approach but we anticipate being able to improve the customisation of this feature once we are able to support more languages.

The translation option will not be visible in the NHS app. The translation component is part of a header in the patient triage form, and we hide the header and footer in the NHS app. We feel that this approach is appropriate as the rest of the NHS app is not translated, so it is highly unlikely that someone in need of translation would navigate to our form through it.

If you require further advice, assistance or support (or to turn this feature on or off), you can always reach out to our user support team at support@accurx.com 💬