Healthcare communication obstacles

Most health care occupants believe that communication is more effective when it is approachable to patient requirements, morals, and inclinations. There are various barriers that inhibit effective communication hence limiting quality health care and these barriers include language variation, cultural variation, and low health literacy. This paper will focus on seven articles and evaluate some of these barriers as they are discussed in the articles. Language differences are termed as life-threatening as it results in miscommunication; this is well described in the article by BMC Health Services Research. The main focus of the research was to address the issue of relations among healthcare givers and the patients who either or don’t share the primary language. Despite the fact that the availability of professional translators has enabled patient satisfaction, the health care givers encounter various challenges in approaching this patient with a language barrier in terms of space, time and interpretation.

Interpretation challenge occurs where the factual translation of a word can upshoot in a very different meaning in the translated language than in the original text the interpretation can be time-consuming hence a challenge to the caregiver. Moreover, the presence of the translator does not give space between the patient and the care giver hence no privacy provided. Low health literacy is another communication barrier that limits the attainment of quality health care, where this is well described in the article by the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health in research that they did. Their main objective was the determination of the influence of health literacy on the quality of healthcare given. The answers were: more confident, moderately confident, somehow confident, and slightly confident and not at all confident.

Therefore, low-level literacy was evaluated as a communication barrier. A cultural difference is another barrier in relation to communication which inhibits the provision of quality health services. The article by Khalid M. Almutairi gives an illustration of the effects of cultural differences in Saudi Arabia. Then the government is supposed to introduce language services such as employing interpreters and communication panel in hospitals. Also, the Saudi Arabia government through its ministry of health should introduce Arabic verbal communication skill test for skillful, emigrants, and non-Arabic orators looking for employment in Saudi Arabia. The language ability test should cover language acquaintance, talking skills, evaluation skills, and listening skills.   REFERENCES https://onlinelibrary. wiley. gov/pmc/articles/PMC2966655/ https://www. ncbi. nlm. nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC5060442/ https://www.