Accessing Advocacy and Interpreting

A free and confidential service ensuring everyone in Tower Hamlets can access primary healthcare with confidence. Available for anyone registered with a Tower Hamlets GP.

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What we do

The Advocacy and Interpreting service provides free and confidential bilingual advocacy, interpreting, translation, and telephone interpreting services. The service is staffed by a team of trained health advocates, all of whom have experience and awareness of the barriers that affect good access to health care.

Our trained interpreters speak a great variety of community languages, including Bengali/Sylheti, Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Somali.

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Our trained Interpreters speak a variety of languages, including:

All language support and bilingual health advocacy requests should be made via our single access number. It can be used both by a local resident and general practices:

Telephone: 020 4526 8323 (8am–8.00pm, Monday-Friday and 9am–5pm on Saturdays)

The phone menu will guide callers to the right language group by asking them to select the number for the language they need. 

Press 0 Service Admin
Press 1 Bengali, Sylheti, Hindi, Urdu
Press 2 Somali, Arabic, Farsi, Pushto
Press 3 Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese
Press 4 Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian
Press 5 Albanian, Kurdish, Turkish, Macedonian
Press 6 Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian
Press 7 Czech, Romanian, Slovak
Press 8 Twi, Amharic, Mongolian
Press 9 For any other languages
Press # To hear these options again

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Once you choose an option, you will then be asked to select the language you require. There are 30 language options on the menu, with an option for further languages which can be supported.

These further options include British Sign Language (BSL). You can learn about our new video British Sign Language Interpreting App for our deaf community in Tower Hamlets  here.

Why the need for the service?

The GP Care Group has a duty to tackle inequalities and improve health outcomes for those with English as a second language as well as vulnerable groups within our communities.

Though the establishment of bilingual support services in many areas was in response to the Government strategy “Access to public services for all”, for boroughs such as Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Newham, and other multi-ethnic boroughs, it was a necessity dictated by the size of our ethnic minority population.

The Tower Hamlets Advocacy and Interpreting Service (THAIS) is a free and confidential service for anyone requiring healthcare, who is registered with one of our 36 partner GP practices plus a small group of additional organisations.

TOWER HAMLETS GP CARE GROUP CIC
Island Health Practice 1st Floor, 145 East Ferry Road, London, England, E14 3BQ
Company number 09233816