Due to ongoing worldwide migration processes, healthcare providers are frequently confronted with providing care to patients from diverse cultural, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Patients who do not share the same backgrounds as their healthcare providers are at increased risk of receiving suboptimal levels of care. To decrease health disparities in care, it is thus of utmost importance to consider the wide range of culture- and language-related barriers those patients face in receiving good quality health care. ACHC research focuses on the antecedents, processes and outcomes of communication with migrant patients, as well as on how to design and implement effective communication interventions to improve the quality of healthcare for those patients.
For nearly 2.5 million people living in the Netherlands Dutch is not their native language. Among them are many people with whom healthcare providers cannot communicate (optimally) without language support. In this project, a guideline working group consisting of representatives of healthcare and social domain professionals, patients, clients and interpreters is developing a guideline module. This module will answer questions […]
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Mental health problems affect about 84 million people across the EU. Refugees and other migrants are particularly at risk of developing mental health problems due to stressors they encounter before, during, and after their migration process. Prevalence rates for some mental health problems, such as posttraumatic stress and psychotic disorders, are higher among refugees and migrants compared to non-migrant populations. […]
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Intercultural medical communication is known to be less effective and adequate than intracultural communication. One possible explanation is that the amount of patient participation during medical consultations is lower when doctors and patients have dissimilar ethnic and cultural backgrounds as compared to consultations in which doctors and patients share the same background. Though, it is unclear why this is the […]
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Turkish migrant patients with insufficient language proficiency in Dutch often take along family members (so-called informal interpreters) to the medical consultation in general practice. However, a recent review study on interpreter-mediated communication in general practice has indicated that there is a dearth of research on interpreter-mediated communication from the perspective of migrant patients themselves. Furthermore, most studies lack a theoretical […]
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Elderly people with cancer are at increased risk of miscommunication with their caregivers. This risk is even more strongly present in the case of non-Western elderly patients with cancer, due to a combination of linguistic and socio-cultural factors. Both culture-related beliefs about illness, health and communication, as well as a relatively low ‘health literacy’, and a lack of Dutch language […]
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