Communicating Across Cultures And Languages In The Health Care Setting

This book offers a novel approach to understanding the complexities of communication in culturally and linguistically diverse health care contexts. It marks the culmination of two decades of research in South Africa, a context that has obvious application in a wider international climate given current globalization and migration trends. The authors draw from a large body of evidence based across different sites and illnesses, scrutinising both the language dynamics of intercultural health interactions and the perceptions and narratives of multiple participants. Including a range of theoretical, methodological and empirical considerations, the volume sheds light upon qualitative research methods and their application in the intercultural context. This book will be a valuable resource for health professionals, medical educators and language practitioners as well as students and scholars of discourse analysis and the medical humanities.

Paperback edition of a guide to the issues and problems faced by health professionals when they communicate with their clients and patients from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Offers many practical solutions and strategies for dealing with cultural and linguistic issues and problems in health care settings. Includes a bibliography and index. The author is the former director of the Language and Society Centre of the National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia. She now holds the foundation chair in Linguistics at the University of New England.

"Communicating in multicultural settings is a field of central interest to those involved in ensuring access to healthcare. Ever-increasing migration requires access to essential legal, medical and social services. This book provides an overview of current issues in this field through a multi-faceted approach, situating the work of potential healthcare professionals and intercultural intermediaries in the broader context of public service providers and practitioners. The book is not oriented towards one population in particular; rather it is directed towards multiple groups, mainly to students of the health sciences and medical professionals interested in communicating with migrants and visitors, and those who have to work in multicultural settings. It is not a theoretical book, nor is it rule-based by any means. It is a handbook oriented towards reflection and practice resulting from years of experience training mediators, interpreters and translators working in minority languages within multicultural settings. It can be used for self-study and independent learning, but will also be extremely useful to teachers and trainers of future doctors and medical staff who seek materials or readings for their classes. Furthermore, it represents an excellent resource for mediators, interpreters and translators who want to learn more about communication in healthcare setting"--Provided by publisher.

Communicating Across Cultures: A Coursebook on Interpreting and Translating in Public Services and Institutions is a manual which addresses the complex task of interpreting and translating through reflection and practice. The book originated from discussions with those who perform the work of an intermediary because they “know” the languages and cultures, and with those who would like to do this type of work, but who may require more training. Thus, it is directed at people who, due to their knowledge of two languages, serve as liaisons between immigrant communities, visitors, or foreigners and the societies that receive them. More precisely, it is directed at future professionals in public service translation and interpreting. Communicating Across Cultures will equip future professionals with the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools to act as linguistic, communicative, and cultural liaisons. It will also help improve the communication between the staff of medical, legal, educational, and administrative institutions and their foreign clients.

Winner of the NCA Health Communication 2021 Distinguished Book Award. This book examines interpreter-mediated medical encounters and focuses primarily on the phenomenon of bilingual health care. It highlights the interactive and coordinated nature of interpreter-mediated interactions. Elaine Hsieh has put together over 15 hours of interpreter-mediated medical encounters, interview data with 26 interpreters from 17 different cultures/languages, 39 health care providers from 5 clinical specialties, and surveys of 293 providers from 5 clinical specialties. The depth and richness of the data allows for the presentation of a theoretical framework that is not restricted by language combination or clinical contexts. This will be the first book of its kind that includes not only interpreters’ perspectives but also the needs and perspectives of providers from various clinical specialties. Bilingual Health Communication presents an opportunity to lay out a new theoretical framework related to bilingual health care and connects the latest findings from multiple disciplines. This volume presents future research directions that promise development for both theory and practice in the field.

This volume is the first to address multilingual healthcare communication around the globe and focuses on institutional, social and linguistic challenges and resources of the healthcare industry. It comprises studies from Canada, Australia, South Africa, Greenland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, and aims to introduce new paths of communicative and methodological agendas, casting a critical view on current linguistic practices in healthcare, nursing and medical interactions. With increased personal mobility in a global society, the need for multilingual staff is on the rise in medical institutions and healthcare organisations, and communicative competencies and practices involving different languages pose challenges for medical doctors, healthcare staff and patients alike. Many studies have highlighted the crucial role played by interpreters and interpreting staff, but the diversity of language situations in different countries requires very different approaches and solutions. Additionally, it may not be possible to develop a single agenda of language services for different medical areas with different needs for counselling, with various forms of treatment that require explanation and the patient‘s informed consent and with varying approaches to the relationship between medical professionals and patients. How to best organise medical (digital) language services in countries as different as South Africa, Greenland, Germany, Belgium and Australia calls for a diversity of possible solutions. The current volume makes a variety of such solutions and practices available for medical staff and healthcare institutions faced with international patients and working with international medical staff. It makes the challenges palpable on an international scale in a way that comparisons may be drawn between different solutions as well as their socio-cultural and institutional implications. This volume is intended for policy makers, medical and healthcare practitioners, institutions, interpreters, teachers and students in professional multilingual healthcare.

Every health professional interacts with patients from different cultures to their own, not just those from different countries, ethnic or religious groups, but also those with cultural differences due to sexual orientation, lifestyle, beliefs, age, gender, social status or perceived economic worth. The potential for confusions in communication and consequent problems are even greater in primary care mental health than in other areas.This guide for all health professionals provides a model for working in mental health across cultures, and outlines practical ways of using psychotherapy skills across cultures. It can be used as personal preparation by individuals in any primary care setting at home or abroad, or as a teaching tool for use with health professionals travelling to another culture, including overseas aid workers and those moving to a new country. It is also of great value to everyone interested in transcultural medicine. 'Wherever we work, whoever we are, we are working across cultures, often without realising it. The first step is to become conscious of this fact. The next step is to read this book' - Jill Benson and Jill Thistlethwaite.

This volume addresses the issue of pragmatic meaning and interpretation in communication contexts regarding health and does so by combining a series of diverse and complementary approaches, which together highlight the relevance of successfully shared understanding to achieve more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable healthcare systems. The volume is divided into five thematic sections: 1) Analytical approaches to health communication, 2) Intercultural and mediated communication, 3) Negotiation and meaning construction, 4) Expertise and common ground, 5) Uncertainty and evasive answers, bringing together a group of top scholars on the much-debated issue of shared understanding both at the micro-level of dialogues between professionals and patients, and the macro-level of institutional communication. In the variety of its contributions, it represents an ambitious attempt at setting pragmatics at the core of healthcare communication research and practice, by combining conceptual reflections on core topics in the field of pragmatics (among which are speech acts, common ground, ambiguity, implicitness), with discourse and linguistic analysis of real-world examples exploring various problems in health communication.