Looking for alternatives to mediated communication in Brussels hospitals presented at Tenth Interdisciplinary Conference on Communication, Medicine & Ethics (COMET) Trondheim Norway

Efficient communication is needed everywhere but it is even more essential in the medical field. In multilingual and multicultural health care settings lack of understanding or misunderstanding may even be life-threatening (Stewart 1995 ). Hospitals in the Brussels region are familiar with the issues of multilingual reception of patients from all over the world. They have developed certain policies, methods and tools to facilitate the intake of foreign patients and to facilitate the interactions between foreign patients and the hospital staff. Despite their valuable efforts, interactions between medical staff and foreign patients remain highly problematic. One aspect is that very often patients do not understand frequently used medical terms (Hadlow & Pitts, 1991 ; Berry, 2007 ). Nierkens (2002) found that in Belgium migrants only understand one third of the information that is communicated by the medical staff. We did a micro-analysis of the interactions between foreign patients and hospital staff at the emergency room of the two biggest Brussels public hospitals. As an exploratory micro-ethnographic empirical study, the researchers spent time at the emergency service of the hospitals to make participant observations of the intake of foreign patients. The multilingual interactions of patients with medical staff - with or without the mediation of intercultural workers - are analyzed (Temmerman, 2011) . Exclusion because of unsuccessful communication appears to be lurking. The research aims to contribute to the knowledge about intercultural communication in medical contexts and to alternative communicative techniques. It is shown how technology opens up new possibilities.
References
Stewart, M.A. (1995). Effective physician-patient communication and health outcomes: a review, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 152, 1423-33
Hadlow, J. & Pitts, M. (1991). The understanding of common health terms by doctors, nurses and patients, Social Science and Medicine, 32, 193-6
Berry, D. (2007). Health communication. Theory and Practice. Berskhire: Open University Press.
Nierkens, V. et al. (2002) "The future of intercultural mediation in Belgium", Patient Education and Counseling 46, nr. 4 (april 2002): 253-259.
Temmerman, Rita (2011) "Researching plurilinguistic competences in specialised domains. Looking for means to prevent exclusion." European Journal of Language Policy, issue 3.2, 163 - 174, Liverpool University Press.