Challenges in Doctor-patient Communication in the Province of Malaga: A Multilingual Crossroads

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2017.02.141Get rights and content
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Abstract

Conveying information in the healthcare context involves a very delicate process in order to achieve successful communication and, hence, a quick response in terms of effective treatment and follow up on the part of the patients.

The following study covers a professional experience based on participation and observation of encounters with patients, analyzing the communication in the healthcare context and the roles adopted by every participant. The analysis we present has been obtained throughout some years as a clinical student with active participation during hospital training periods with doctors, nurses and other healthcare co-workers in several hospitals, both public and private where communications with foreign patients have always posed a hurdle in certain cases. The linguistic issues found in hospitals belonging to several areas of the province of Malaga, in which several foreign cultures converge will be analyzed in order to reach a final conclusion together with the potential strategies including multimodality that could be valid from the point of view of doctors to enhance communication when there are problems due to several factors such as language barriers, dialects, mental health issues or disability challenges.

Keywords

communication
patients
humanistic approach
technologies
multimodal resources

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Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of EDUHEM 2016.