Improving language awareness in mental health care by engaging clinicians of language diverse patients
Despite the diverse linguistic profiles of patients at inner city hospitals, language barrier between patients and clinical staff remains neglected. Reasons may include lack of awareness of language barrier by clinicians and silencing of barriers by organizational practices and management priorities. From prior research, inpatient psychiatry nurses and medical students are least likely to seek the help of interpreters when faced with patients that don’t speak English or French. Reasons for these practice patterns are unknown.
Developing previous work, this study aims to clarify the quality of language barriers in clinical settings, focusing especially, but not uniquely, on the work of nurses and medical students, to (1) document clinician awareness of language barriers in their patients; (2) explore how awareness of language barriers can be enhanced professionally and institutionally; (3) evaluate the discourses reinforcing language barrier in clinical practice; and (4) assess whether promoting awareness of language barrier results in a measurable increase in documentation of language dynamics in patient charts and a corresponding increase in clinician satisfaction working with language diverse patients in clinical mental health settings. Investigators hypothesize that after focus groups on language barrier over one year on psychiatric services, measurements at Time 1 compared to Time 2 will show (1) a statistically significant increase of clinician awareness of language barriers as measured by mentions of language issues in patient charts and (2) greater clinical satisfaction working with language diverse patients.
Outcomes were curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.