Understanding language barriers: nurses' and patients' perspectives

As the Hispanic community becomes the largest minority in the United States, it is important for health-care providers to explore ways to enhance communication with their Spanish-speaking patients. Research is abundant in this field but scare in on of the most vulnerable populations, postpartum women. This work focused on describing the thoughts, feelings, and ideas from nurses and patients regarding language barriers in the health-care setting. Towards this aim, I took two approaches. First 15 registered nurses' and 11 patients' responses were obtained and analyzed from four focus group discussions in order to answer research questions. Frustration and fear were among the major themes extracted from analyzing responses and were the common denominators for all groups. Interestingly, all participants were embarrassed to use their limited foreign language skills. A series of misunderstanding situations were identified in all participants' groups, as it was a concern for confidentiality issues and the belief that it was not their sole responsibility to learn a foreign language. Assumptions" was a topic for the nurse groups and "quality of interpreters" was a topic for the patients would like nurses to learn Spanish and nurses would like patients to speak English. Most groups also contemplated the possibility of pocket-size translator as a solution. Second, the demographic questionnaires revealed that short-term nurse employees are more prepared with Spanish classes than long-term nurse employees. In addition, most of the nurses did not feel comfortable taking care of Spanish-speaking patients. For patients, their answers revealed that most of them were in their early 20s, their level of education was below ninth grade, and their family income was below the poverty level. Patients had been residing in the United States for less than 9 years, and none of them had medical insurance. Understanding participants' perspectives about language barriers and practicing solutions addressed by the affected parties are vital in order to make modifications accurate and valuable to those involved. When these improvements are applied to the health-care setting, their implementation achieves significance as misdiagnosis, misinterpretation, dissatisfaction, and negative health outcomes are reduced.