Mary DaSilva

I lead one of the largest interpreting services departments in the state of Minnesota with a team of 86-87 interpreters covering 19 different languages internally. My typical day involves everything from catching up on emails, supporting daily operations, managing our language vendor partners, reviewing quality data and heat maps, aligning staff accordingly, and monitoring our budgets to ensure we're financially sound while providing exceptional services. But the best part of my role is connecting with my interpreter team. I've been an interpreter myself, I'm still an interpreter, and my team will come to my office to debrief about their cases. I'm able to guide them, and at times I learn from them too about new procedures I've never interpreted for before. I'm a millennial manager, and my philosophy is that we need to take care of our workforce and our teams so they can deliver the best service to our patients and our clinical partners. I make sure my interpreters have the tools they need to be successful, whether that's an ergonomic evaluation at their home for remote interpreters or a special mouse. I meet with the interpreter union to address areas of concern, and on Thursdays during our huddles, I share positive patient feedback from surveys with the team to keep them engaged. One of my proudest accomplishments was adding our organization's very first Spanish translator to the team, something I had envisioned when I arrived at Hennepin and had previously done at Children's when I was a supervisor there.