I am currently on my musculo prac at Curtin clinic. One of my new patients speaks limited English which can be difficult when educating her about her condition and trying to get a detailed subjective picture of her pain (especially when she doesn’t know what “ache” and “burning” in regards to pain means). She presented with cervical pain which was later diagnosed as irritation of the C3/4 facets and C5/6 facets due to the protracted neck position she has adopted from having generalized hypermobility of all joints.
I found it very difficult to tell her what was happening to cause her pain, as her basic English was limited. She told me she would look up any words she didn’t understand in her English translation dictionary. With this in mind I wrote down a bit about her disorder and underlined the words she didn’t understand. I wrote: you have hypermobility (lots of movement) in all your joints because your ligaments are too stretchy. I didn’t think they would have diagrams of ligaments and joints in the English dictionary so I showed her a good picture of the skeletal system with ligaments intact and also used a model to show her how ligaments let our joints move/restrict movement.
She was very grateful for me dedicating time to allow her to understand her condition, as she was very confused initially as she had seen a doctor who probably didn’t take the time to explain it to her. In the future I will use shorter words and rely heavily on models and diagrams to make sure people with limited English skills understand their condition fully, as they will be more likely to comply with self-management.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hi, I have also encountered with some patients who spoke very limited English in my last placements. My multilingual skills gave me the advantage of communicating with some of the non-English speaking patients and I was very surprised with how little they knew about their conditions and the treatment that they were receiving in the hospitals. Some expressed their frustration as they totally had no idea with what was going on during their admission, for example, why they were transferred to different wards, as many health professionals would not bother to explain or improve the ways of communicating with these non-English speaking patients. Therefore, I really like your ideas of using diagrams and models to help improve their understanding about their conditions which most importantly show that you care about what the patients feel and treat them equally as other patients which will definitely help to achieve a good treatment outcome. Well done ^.^
I have also had a new patient this week on my neurology ward, who speaks limited english. This makes it difficult to assess her, since she has been described by the doctor as being dysphasic(she has thalamic, midbrain and SCP lesion) however, it is difficult to determine whether her lack of understanding, is language related of dysphasia. I find my patient responds well to short and simple sentences. and i find that often has health professionals we tend to use more jargon than we think we are using. So sometimes it is useful to step out of a university student's mind and think in layman's terms, without being unproffesional.
Post a Comment