Providing Health Care in the Context of Language Barriers: International Perspectives

Global migration continues to increase, and with it comes increasing linguistic diversity. This presents obvious challenges for both healthcare provider and patient, and the chapters in this volume represent a range of international perspectives on language barriers in health care. A variety of factors influence the best ways of approaching and overcoming these language barriers, including cultural, geographical, political and practical considerations, and as a result a range of approaches and solutions are suggested and discussed. The authors in this volume discuss a wide range of countries and languages, and cover issues that will be familiar to all healthcare practitioners, including the role of informal interpreters, interpreting in a clinical setting, bilingual healthcare practitioners and working with languages with comparatively small numbers of speakers.

Elizabeth A. Jacobs is Professor of Medicine and Population Health Sciences and Associate Vice Chair for Health Services Research at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, USA.

Lisa C. Diamond is Assistant Member/Assistant Attending at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Immigrant Health and Cancer Disparities Service, New York, USA.