Health care workers encounter language and communication barriers in their day to day care encounters with patients from diverse language and cultural backgrounds. It would be interesting to hear about the personal and professional experiences of health care staff in providing safe day to day care to patients and how they attempt to address these barriers with patients.
Much research has been conducted in this area. The communication barriers that exist in the patient-caregiver relationship are numerous, including: racial, emotional, socioeconomic, language, knowledge, and education. This is a long discussion. I'll review some of my work in this area and get back to you soon.
Communication barriers between medical staff and patients resp their relatives
are a serious problem of patient safety.
To make sure that information is understood right e.g. diagnosis, therapy options agreement, it is useful to take hold of translators in a supply unit. This becomes more and more difficult by increasing multicultural heteronomy.
Helpful in daily communication are communication aids in form of picture books with bilingual text. Contemporary it seems that attempts to develop such materials for many languages fail economically by lack of demand or conversion in electronical tools.