The Dynamics of (Mis)Communication in Language Discordant Multi-Party Consultations in the Emergency Department

International migration is at an all-time high. The number of international migrants residing in
Belgium soared from a bit over 850 thousand in 2000 to almost 1.4 million in 2015 (World
Bank 2016). Over the same period, the number of global migrants grew from 172 million to
243 million. A major implication of these expanding migration patterns is the increasing
diversity observed in hospitals in metropolitan areas around the world. Patients of foreign
descent are often overrepresented in hospital-based care, which means that hospital staff around
the world are increasingly confronted with the challenge of communicating with patients with
whom they do not share a common language. While this generates particular challenges for
quality of and access to care in hospitals (Scheeres et al. 2008), most of the existing research
on clinical communication has focused on primary care rather than secondary, hospital-based
care.