Hey All,
I’m sure some of you at one stage or another have come across patients who didn’t speak much English, and had a lot of difficulty communicating with eachother. I’ve had a few of these in the past clinics, and I really felt I wasn’t able to relay all the information across to patients and vice-versa, potentially making the session quiet unproductive.
If I was seeing the patient for the first time, there would always been a family member there to translate, however its all the follow up appointments where I struggled. One such incident was on my cardio placement.
I was able to do an intial assessment and treatment with the patient whilst his daughter translated almost all of it. However when I went back the next day, there was no family member, so having to ask things like pain level, dizziness, nausea, cough, sputum production was a real challenge. When I found that using hand gestures or mimicking actions werent helping get the message through, I’d just ignore the question, and move on. I really don’t know how much the patient was able to understand me, and whether I got reliable answers for my questions. At times I was unable to tell how the patient was feeling, if he was in any pain to get up and move around. I found I had to rely a lot on the nursing obs to get a better a picture. Whilst I would be walking the patient, it was really difficult trying to find out whether he wanted a rest, or if he was in pain, feeling unwell etc.
During 1 of these sessions, as soon as the patient finished walking and sat down, he vomited. What concerns me is that the whole time, I had no indication of how he was feeling, all he had told me everytime I asked something was “fine fine”. However the whole communication situation was made a lot easier when I discovered his daughter had written down all the English words (pain, nausea etc) and translated them as well, so everytime I needed to ask him something, I’d just have to point to the word.
So what I learnt from this prac was that something as simple had writing down common words used, and having them translated makes somewhat of a difference.
Has anyone else had similar communication problems, and if so, how did they manage to deal with it?
Till next week
Rev
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Hi Rev
That experience is definitely familiar! I have found that often on placements a staff member is discovered that happens to speak the language which is a great help, although of course the staff member has their own workload to manage as well. However, at my current prac I have recently discovered a terrific file called 'Hospital Words'. It contains photocopys of pages taken from language books from the 'hospital pages', there is about 30 different languages and about 40 words to a page, of all the common words such as 'pain' 'toilet' 'dizzy' etc complete with pictures next to them. This means that if you get stuck in a language breakdown you can use this handy little file! So simple and yet so clever... :)
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