< Back to previous page

Project

The right to health: overcoming language barriers in a superdiverse world.

Currently there are 272 million international migrants worldwide. This has resulted in linguistically and culturally diverse healthcare systems where healthcare professionals and patients frequently do not share a common language. Language barriers arising from language discordance between healthcare professionals and patients are the most influential impediment to effective medical communication with dire consequences for the quality of public health. Despite the human right to health, effective interventions to overcome language barriers are lacking and quality of care suffers from ad hoc pragmatism to mitigate these barriers. This project aims to develop and evaluate an evidence-based (digital) decision-aid tool for patients and healthcare professionals, thereby enabling joint personalized and informed decision-making on effectively applying integrated communication strategies to mitigate the language barrier and enhance patient outcomes. The project has the potential to make a ground-breaking contribution to intercultural and multilingual healthcare communication from both a societal and scientific perspective. With regard to societal impact, patients with limited Dutch language proficiency and their carers, healthcare professionals, and the Dutch/Belgian healthcare system will benefit from more inclusive, participatory and equitable healthcare communication practices that are anticipated to reduce costs for the healthcare system. The project will have a scientific impact by responding to the call for a paradigm shift in healthcare research by using a complexity science interdisciplinary approach in which traditional research standards (a randomized controlled trial) are augmented with new research strategies (rich theorizing). This will contribute to conjunctive theory-building in the field of intercultural and multilingual healthcare communication.

Date:1 Nov 2021 →  Today
Keywords:language use, language barriers, multimodal communication
Disciplines:Language studies not elsewhere classified, Translation and interpretation sciences, Pragmatics, Discourse studies, Health informatics