Background: Language discrepancies may create barriers to healthcare, compromise the quality of care and worsen health outcomes. This study explored what European countries currently do to ensure that foreign patients receive sufficient information about their medications if they do not understand the country's national language.
Methods: A questionnaire was distributed to the delegates of two Council of Europe committees. The recipients were asked to provide insights on how their country facilitates access to the necessary product information when patients do not understand the national language.
Results: Seventeen out of 39 delegates completed the questionnaire. The majority of the respondents indicated that all healthcare professionals experience difficulties in providing guidance and advice to foreign patients. The results also showed that different methods are used nationally to present the necessary information to foreigners. Finally, the observations from this survey suggested that electronic leaflets in the patient's primary language could be a valuable option to improve access to medication-related information.
Conclusions: Healthcare professionals seem to encounter challenges in providing foreign patients with information associated with medication use. Electronic leaflets can be one of the tools for improving communication between these patients and healthcare professionals to ensure that medicines are used safely and effectively.
Background: Clinicians and their employers, concerned with privacy and liability, are often hesitant to support the recording of clinical encounters. However, many people wish to record encounters with healthcare professionals. It is therefore important to understand how existing law applies to situations where an individual requests to record a clinical encounter.
Methods: We searched for and reviewed relevant legal documents that could apply to recording clinical encounters. We limited the scope by purposefully examining relevant law in nine countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States. We analyzed legal texts for consents needed to record a conversation, whether laws applied to remote or face-to-face conversations and penalties for violations.
Findings: Most jurisdictions have case law or statutes, derived from a constitutional right to privacy, or a wiretapping or eavesdropping statute, governing the recording of private conversations. However, little to no guidance exists on how to translate constitutional principles and case law into advice for people seeking to record their medical encounters.
Interpretation: The law has not kept pace with people's wish to record clinical interactions, which has been enabled by the arrival of mobile technology.
A cross-sectional study design explored the relationship between medical students' Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) clinical communication ratings and their responsiveness to simulated patient (SP) verbal emotional cues in their qualifying OSCE. Data were collected from two cohorts of fourth-year medical students (n = 37), and responses to patient cues that facilitated further disclosure or related discussion - known as provide space responses - from two OSCE communication stations were measured by coding video footage with the Verona Coding Definition of Emotional Sequences (VR-CoDES). The 37 medical students were representative of the larger cohort (n = 508) in terms of age. A significant positive correlation with a medium effect was found between OSCE clinical communication ratings and provide space responses. OSCE clinical communication ratings could differentiate between students who adopted patient-centred facilitative behaviours and those who did not.
With increasing immigration to Europe, migrants and ethnic minorities (MEMs) are progressively represented on transplant waiting lists. However, they remain underrepresented among the pools of both deceased and living donors (LD). Further, studies report inferior knowledge and/or understanding of organ donation and transplantation among these populations, with the potential for detrimental impacts on accessibility, quality and outcomes of care. The ethnic and cultural diversity characterising European societies poses additional challenges to the complexity inherent to communication in transplant settings. This study addresses the ethical, theoretical and practical implications of targeting/tailoring interventions for MEM populations in the transplant continuum. It puts forward a call for action on the emergent issue of how institutional actors and healthcare professionals should interact more effectively with MEM publics, potential donors and/or their families and MEM transplant candidates/recipients/LDs.
Developing a professional identity in physicians-in-training is a central, but contested, outcome of medical education. In recent years scholars have argued for the importance of including affective experiences, especially shame, in the discourse around medical training. This discourse reflects projection and anticipation around both shame and professional identity, and the question of how shame impacts the latter is critical. Shame is an affect that arises when the self is confronted by the gaze, judgment or awareness of an Other; it can have profound impacts on identity and self-concept, and is highly prevalent in medicine and healthcare. This article posits 'anticipated shame' as a potent factor implicit in the experience of developing a medical professional identity, and connects shame to stigma and marginalization in medical training. Shame, and the anticipation of shame in student-teacher and trainee-patient interactions, highlights aspects of interpersonal communication within medical training and then practice. The concept of anticipated shame offers rich ground to theorize the effects of affect in medical education, and how trainees internalize medical cultural values and then enter the field of clinical practice.
Objective: To use a discourse analysis approach to identify salient features in the lived experiences of dental professionals in relation to explaining periodontal (gum) disease to patients.
Methods: Interview data from 13 UK-trained and three internationally-trained dental professionals was examined using thematic discourse analysis. The first stage (discourse analysis) focused on the identification of language patterns in the interview data. This stage forms the focus of this paper.
Findings: Six discourse categories (Clinician, Mentor, Educator, Collaborator, Rapport Builder, Professional) were identified that related to the participants' perceived professional roles. The categories were associated with differing worldviews and language use patterns, but with some overlap. All interviewees used a variety of discourse categories in their accounts, but a few relied predominantly on one category, e.g., Clinician or Mentor.
Conclusions: The local discourse categories identified in this study reflect broader discourses in healthcare relating to the roles of providers and patients, which have evolved through time.
Practice implications: Practising dental professionals are faced with a diverse range of patients who have different communication preferences. A suite of discourse categories can act as a 'toolbox' that dental professionals can flexibly draw on when needing to adopt a role that could predispose a particular patient to positive oral health behaviour change.

