Replies
Please respond to a minimum of two peers’ initial posts.
Your reply post should include strategies for adapting the environment and the health assessment techniques in order to best facilitate the provider-patient relationship and an effective health assessment. Each reply post should include at least two scholarly sources to support your suggested strategies.
PLEASE REPLY TO THIS POST:
J.A. is a 72 year old female, full code, who presents at our emergency room with right sided weakness, speech difficulty and altered mental status. She is in town visiting her family from her home country of Armenia. She is Armenian speaking only and her daughter is at the bedside translating, as there are no in person medical interpreters on site and the digital translator service does not speak her specific dialect of Western Armenian.
Shamsi et al. (2020) demonstrated that language barriers in healthcare lead to increased rates of miscommunication between the provider and patient, leading to a reduction in both parties’ satisfaction as well as a decrease in the quality of healthcare delivered. Clearly the language barrier for J.A. will affect the quality of care delivered.
The use of a family member as an interpreter can also affect quality of the health assessment. Family members, opposed to neutral, professionally trained medical interpreters, may give inaccurate information such as giving their own version of events or not translate exactly what the patient is saying and instead giving their own answer (Rimmer, 2020). In this example, the daughter of J.A. may not be translating exactly what the family member is saying, causing the provider to have a difficult time completing an assessment like the NIH stroke scale which relies on the patient’s ability to answer specific questions.
The patient’s Armenian culture may be overlooked in a fast-paced environment such as in this emergency medicine situation. This oversight of not providing social and cultural considerations when delivering emergency medical care has been observed to perpetuate existing inequities in health outcomes (Hayba et al., 2023). This difference in culture could be seen as having a potential negative impact on the quality of health care delivered if not addressed with consideration.
