Why Do Bilingual Doctors Use Language Barriers?

As recently discussed, it is important for bilingual physicians to listen and communicate with Spanish-speaking patients, which requires expertise of the language. Doctors and medical students have a tendency to overestimate their language skills and underutilize professional interpreters, which leads to false fluency. There must be training for doctors to know when to call interpreters because doctors sometimes don’t recognize that they are missing key pieces of patient information. Their overconfidence ultimately leads to medical errors. Therefore, there must a balance between knowing when to call an interpreter during an appointment and utilizing one’s language skills. “You only hear what you can understand,” Dr. Jacqueline Sutera says, …show more content…
In addition, these language barriers are linked with lower patient understanding, satisfaction, and even poorer clinical outcomes (Fernandez and Perez-Stable). When language barriers are present, patient safety suffers since language barriers contribute to health care disparities and poor health literacy (Pechak et al.). This is detrimental because poor health literacy is associated with fewer preventative screenings, greater use of emergency care, and errors about medical treatments. Miscommunication between a doctor and patient hinders health related outcomes and can even increase rates of physical injury (Mona Shattel). Another important realization is that language barriers not only include miscommunication in linguistics, but also differences in cultural values and sensitivities. Illness is culturally determined and defined in how a society perceives sickness. Therefore, if a native English-speaking doctor is speaking to a native Spanish-speaking patient, then the physician must be aware of differences in cultural values. It is important for doctors to understand his or her patient in terms of language not only in a linguistic sense, but also language in terms of different cultural definitions of values and