Departments of Emergency Medicine and Medical Education, College of Medicine, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA.
Spanish Applied Linguistics for World Languages and Cultures, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, IN, USA.
Perspect Med Educ. 2020 Aug;9(4):251-255. doi: 10.1007/s40037-020-00595-z.
Medical communication across languages is gaining attention as the multilingual character of local, regional, and national populations across the world continues to grow. Effectively communicating with patients involves not only learning medical terminology, but also understanding the community's linguistic practices, and gaining the ability to explain health concepts in patient-centered language. Language concordance between physicians and patients improves patient outcomes, but methods to teach communication skills for physicians are usually limited to the majority or official language. For example, in U.S. medical schools increased demand for physician skills in other languages, such as Spanish, has resulted in renewed academic discourse about best practices in teaching practical communication skills for physicians. In language education, translanguaging is an approach that integrates and validates multilingual individuals' real use of language, which often includes non-standard words, regionalisms, and mixed influences from multiple languages, such as Spanglish or Chinglish. Efforts to improve medical language concordance by teaching a second language to medical students would benefit from an understanding of patient-centered communication strategies, such as is supported by translanguaging. Teaching effective communication skills to physicians should evolve and engage with the fluid linguistic attributes of culturally and linguistically diverse patient populations. In this eye opener, we first introduce the translanguaging perspective as an approach that can increase attention to patient-centered communication, which often includes spontaneous practices that transcend the traditional boundaries of named languages, and then present examples of how translanguaging can be implemented in medical education in order to sustainably enhance equity-minded patient-accessible medical communication.
随着世界范围内本地、地区和国家人口的多语言特征不断增加，跨语言的医学交流越来越受到关注。与患者进行有效的沟通不仅需要学习医学术语，还需要了解社区的语言实践，并能够用以患者为中心的语言解释健康概念。医生和患者之间的语言一致性可以改善患者的治疗效果，但教授医生沟通技巧的方法通常仅限于多数或官方语言。例如，在美国的医学院，对医生掌握西班牙语等其他语言技能的需求增加，这导致人们重新探讨教授医生实用沟通技巧的最佳实践。在语言教育中，使用多种语言是一种整合和验证多语言者实际语言使用的方法，其中通常包括非标准词汇、地区用语和多种语言的混合影响，例如 Spanglish 或 Chinglish。通过向医学生教授第二语言来提高医疗语言一致性的努力将受益于以患者为中心的沟通策略的理解，例如使用多种语言来支持的策略。教授医生有效的沟通技巧应该与时俱进，并与文化和语言多样化的患者群体的流动语言属性相契合。在这篇发人深省的文章中，我们首先介绍了使用多种语言的视角，作为一种可以提高以患者为中心的沟通的方法，这种方法通常包括超越传统命名语言界限的自发实践，然后介绍了在医学教育中实施使用多种语言的方法，以可持续地增强以公平为导向的患者可获得的医疗沟通。
