In the UK, public healthcare workers frequently turn to machine translation—predominantly Google Translate—to communicate with patients who do not share a common language, aiming to fulfil their duty of care. However, uninformed reliance on MT in high‑stakes contexts such as patient records can jeopardise safety. Existing literature mainly examines MT in interpersonal exchanges or patient‑facing documents, leaving a gap in understanding staff awareness of MT risks in more critical scenarios.\ \ Medical abbreviations are already known to increase the likelihood of misinterpretation and medication errors even in monolingual settings, with consequences ranging from minor harm to death. Consequently, this study uses abbreviations as a use case to identify the specific risks introduced by MT. Researchers extracted authentic clinical sentences in French and Spanish from authoritative corpora, translated them with Google Translate, and presented the outputs during semi‑structured interviews with 21 healthcare staff members across diverse roles and specialties.\ \ Qualitative coding and cross‑analysis of the interview data revealed several key points:\
- Most participants lacked a clear understanding of MT limitations, especially regarding abbreviation handling;\
- Mis‑translated abbreviations often resulted in lost information or ambiguous meanings, potentially influencing clinical decisions;\
- In urgent situations, staff tended to rely on MT without secondary verification or human proofreading;\
- Participants expressed a strong desire for abbreviation‑specific translation guidelines or training to mitigate risks.\ \ The findings suggest that raising staff awareness of MT risks, establishing explicit usage protocols, and providing professional translation support are essential to reduce patient‑safety incidents caused by abbreviation mistranslation.\ \ Review: This paper empirically uncovers blind spots in healthcare professionals’ use of machine translation, urging policymakers and hospital administrators to pair digital language tools with robust risk education and technical oversight.