Community voices, collective solutions: Integrating secondary traumatic stress prevention into medical interpreter training using community-based participatory research.

Medical interpreters are frequently exposed to emotionally charged and potentially traumatic patient narratives in their work, increasing their risk for developing secondary traumatic stress (STS) and contributing to burnout, compassion fatigue, and turnover. These occupational stressors represent trauma embedded within healthcare delivery systems, rather than solely an individual-level burden, with downstream effects on systems of care that affect patients (e.g., communication, adherence, disclosure, trust), workforce retention, healthcare quality, and health equity. Despite these detrimental outcomes, there are currently no universal STS prevention programs or institutional guidelines, which limits the dissemination of STS training among medical interpreters. The present practice-oriented study describes a community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership between university researchers and a community organization housing a Spanish–English interpreter training program serving predominantly Latine patients. We discuss the partnership building process using a CBPR logic model describing the most salient factors influencing the initiative relating to the context, group dynamics, systemic intervention, and anecdotal outcomes. We discuss a three-component, trauma-informed systemic intervention for preventing STS in medical interpreters that emerged from this collaboration, which includes psychoeducation and skills training, routine monitoring, and structured processing groups. We describe anecdotal lessons learned from this collaboration relating to the use of a CBPR approach, the importance of reflexivity and flexibility, ways of further developing the systemic intervention, and the tension between CBPR and neoliberalism in academia. Finally, implications, limitations, and future directions are provided, including the need for quantitative/qualitative evaluations of the described integrated STS prevention framework for medical interpreter training programs.