[Mother tongue in medicine]
Call to the emergency coordination center of Gipuzkoa: a car catches a man, send help as soon as possible, please. The medicated ambulance has arrived at the site at full speed. The man is dead or alive and the doctor wants to treat him to improve his restlessness. So the question is "Do you have allergies? ". The patient's response: "I'm not from Algeria, I'm from Morocco." The doctor and the patient do not understand each other and it is not possible to fulfill one of the bases of medicine, which is the communication between the patient and the doctor. Thus, the patient's well-being is compromised.
The medical students, and those of us who are studying in the field of health in general, repeat from beginning to end the importance of the correct fulfillment of the clinical history, with a good compilation of the history, the treatment and the disease of the moment, in order to make a correct diagnosis to the patient and put the appropriate treatment in place. After all, the mission of a doctor is, in most cases, to heal the patient and ensure their well-being. And that’s what makes a doctor “good,” caring for the patient well and making a proper diagnosis, and saving his life after doing so or relieving his more severe symptoms; but there are other things that make a good doctor: promoting the patient’s health, preventing illness, and caring for mental health problems.
In addition, it should be the role of all health personnel to have the means to communicate in the best possible way with the patient in a vulnerable situation. How will the doctor perform his/her function properly without communicating with the patient? Today, access to quality health care is a right of everyone, for which it is essential to have adequate communication with health workers, i.e. to be cared for preferably in one’s own mother tongue. Because when we do not understand what the interlocutor tells us, we interpret the situation, and when interpretation is involved, especially in medicine, we make it worse.
And this situation is not only experienced by the Basques; we have numerous examples throughout the world that reflect our problems with language in the field of medicine. The European Convention on Human Rights, for example, recognises the particular and often vulnerable situation of patients in the clinical setting and makes it clear that, in the face of this situation, health personnel must necessarily take into account the mother tongue of patients.
All health workers, through continuous training, should have access to tools to better communicate with the patient, and it is essential that this training also includes knowledge of the mother tongue. In this regard, it would be advisable to receive staff from abroad to our health system and, in addition to explaining the characteristics of the health system in the Basque Country, also to make them aware of the peculiarities, needs and characteristics of our language. In Catalonia, for example, they have initiatives such as "language couples": the professional who has just arrived in the country comes into contact with a colleague of the same speciality, and thus also with Catalan; and slowly, the newcomer is mastering the language. This type of initiative is necessary, even with local staff, because to promote the use of the language and finally to master it, it is essential to promote its use in the day to day. In order to receive quality health care, it is absolutely necessary and essential to have it taken care of in the mother tongue of each person.
-> Death and words
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