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Health Equity
September 16, 2024

Language Discordance and Patient Care鈥擝abel

Author Affiliations
  • 1Bon Secours Mercy Health Loveland Primary Care, Cincinnati, Ohio
  • 2University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio
JAMA Intern Med. 2024;184(11):1287-1288. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2024.4273

鈥溌y煤deme doctora!鈥 Her urgent tone and panicked face left nothing to interpretation. She arrived in labor the night prior and was rushed to have a caesarean delivery. Now, she said, her newborn was intermittently not breathing.

This was not her first child. It was her rainbow baby. Her first died shortly before the due date, in her belly.

I was caring for mother-infant dyads. She was on the general postpartum floor, rooming-in with her newborn to promote bonding. This hospital, touted for its excellent patient care, was why she had come here. Unfortunately, patients with language discordance often face additional bias (both implicit and explicit) based on perceived differences in ethnicity and culture.

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1 Comment for this article
Overcoming language discordance
Joseph Horowitz, Ph.D. | University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Healthcare facilities should certainly be following the law and providing interpreters where needed, but, at least as a stopgap measure, there are numerous language translation apps for smartphones. From what I've heard anecdotally, they seem to work reasonably well. Whether this is well enough for urgent communications in a hospital setting, I don't know, but they are readily available, cheap, and (presumably) better than nothing.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None Reported
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