The Neurological Examination: Overcoming Language Barriers to Increase Access to Patient-directed Neurologic Care
Richard Suarez1, Daniella Nunez1, Stephanie Martinez1, Christelle Azolin1, Ghardie Mathelier2, Jenny Fortun1
1Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, 2Dr. Kiran C. Patel College of Allopathic Medicine
Objective:
How can access to neurologic care be maximized for patients of different cultural and language backgrounds? We hypothesize that guides in various languages will better equip physicians to aid a diverse population of patients with neurological diseases.
Background:
Language barriers have been consistently recognized as a critical problem in healthcare. Research has demonstrated that these hurdles lead to miscommunication, impaired physician-patient relationships, reduced patient safety, and an overall drop in the quality and satisfaction of services provided. Though efforts to mitigate these barriers have been attempted, including professional translation services, these solutions have led to further problems, specifically increased cost, and duration of patient encounters. To date, we are unaware of a published set of guides detailing the neurological examination in different languages nor the development of a session to educate future providers.
Design/Methods:
We developed guides to the neurological examination in different languages (English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, French and American Sign Language) in order to increase providers’ abilities to care for patients with neurologic conditions from various cultural and language backgrounds. The guides generated will be provided to medical students and current practitioners via printed copies and PDF documents. Medical students will be instructed on how to use the guides with an informative session.
Results:
A total of five guides were developed. The intention is to incorporate them into an educational session for medical students to learn how to effectively use these guides to accurately perform the neurologic examination in different languages. The session will be implemented within the College of Medicine curriculum.
Conclusions:
These neurological examination guides–and the subsequent educational session– can be used to address some of the language barriers that patients with neurologic disease face within the clinical setting. With this, we anticipate patients could experience an improvement in communication, enhancement in patient-doctor relationships, and better clinical assessment.