Objective-Family communication is important for delivering high quality end-of-life care in the ICU, yet little research has been conducted to describe and evaluate clinician-family communication with non-English speaking family members. We assessed clinician-family communication during ICU family conferences involving interpreters and compared it to conferences without interpreters.Design-Cross-sectional descriptive study.Setting-Family conferences in the ICU's of four hospitals during which discussions about withdrawing life support or delivery of bad news were likely to occur.Participants-70 family members from 10 interpreted conferences and 214 family members from 51 non-interpreted conferences. Nine different physicians led interpreted conferences and 36 different physicians led non-interpreted conferences.Measurements-All 61 conferences were audiotaped. We measured the duration of time that families, interpreters, and clinicians spoke during the conference and we tallied the number of supportive statements issued by clinicians in each conference.Results-The mean conference time was 26.3 ± 13 minutes for interpreted and 32±15 minutes for non-interpreted conferences (p=0.25). The duration of clinician speech was 10.9 ± 5.8 minutes for interpreted conferences and 19.6 ± 10.2 minutes for non-interpreted conferences (p=0.001). The amount of clinician speech as a proportion of total speech time was 42.7% in interpreted conferences and 60.5% in non-interpreted conferences (p=0.004). Interpreter speech accounted for 7.9 ± 4.4 minutes and 32% of speech in interpreter conferences. Interpreted conferences contained fewer clinician statements providing support for families, including valuing families' input (p=0.01), easing emotional burdens (p<0.01), and active listening (p<0.01).Conclusions-This study suggests that families with non-English speaking members may be at increased risk of receiving less information about their loved one's critical illness as well as less NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptCrit Care Med. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 1.