Emergency Communication

According to a recent ABC 15 news announcement at http://www.wpde.com/news/viewarticle.asp?view=7062 "fighting fires and fighting health emergencies also means fighting a language barrier." Many emergency workers are having difficulties trying to help people who do not speak English.

Apparently, the rescue associations have singled out Spanish as a the primary non-English language to focus on. "To try to break through the language barrier, rescuers take spanish [sic] classes, they have a spanish [sic] program on their computer and they carry around a mini-spanish [sic] guide, but it's still a significant problem." Yet, even with their Spanish training, many rescue workers must result to simple hand signals to figure out what ails a patient.

The workers must have even greater difficulties in areas where multiple foreign languages are prevalent. I suppose in such places the rescue workers are forced to simply speak English with a lot of gestures and hope that the patient is calm and sensible enough to point to where it hurts.

Of course, in such an important field as emergency communication--where lives all too often hang on the line--much research has been done to ensure that interlinguistic communication is as smooth as possible. An article in the British Journal of General Practice titled "Improving Communication Between Physicians and Patients who Speak a Foreign Language" outlines a study done on communications between francophonic physicians and allophonic patients (with a francophonic patient control group). Before and after the study, the physicians and patients both filled out surveys concerning their satisfaction with care given and recieved and with communication during consultation. The ratings given by the allophones improved slightly from one consultation to the next, but the ratings given by physicians remained the same. The conclusion which the scientists produced at the end of their study was that "[t]he quality of communication as perceived by allophone patients can be improved with specific training aimed at primary care physicians."

In other words, studies such as this one have shown that physician-patient communication can be improved by training the physicians, even if they do not speak the language of the patients. Perhaps this is simply because both parties developed better methods of sign language during the study, perhaps the patients grew more relaxed around the doctors and were inclined to rate them more highly, perhaps each learned a little of the other's language, or perhaps it is caused by some other unidentified factor. Whatever the cause, it seems important that physicians, particularly emergency personnel, be provided with training which allows them to more effectively communicate with patients speaking foreign languages.