What we do

The Tower Hamlets Advocacy & Interpreting Service is a free and confidential service aimed at ensuring everyone within the Borough has equal access to primary healthcare through the provision of bilingual advocacy, interpreting, translation, and telephone interpreting services.

The service is staffed by a team of trained health advocates, all of whom have tested experience and awareness of barriers that affect good access to health care.

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, that can be used both by service users and GP Practices:

Telephone: 020 4526 8323 (Open 8am - 6:30pm Mon-Fri)

The new languages include Twi, Macedonian, Mongolian and many more.

A new 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
     

Once you choose an option, you will then be asked to select the exact language you require, to repeat the options please Press * and to return to the main menu Press #

We can also provide other languages including 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.