title: The impact of language communication barriers on non-Arab medical practitioners’ healthcare delivery and ways of addressing miscommunication issues: An exploratory-phenomenological study of Bahrain
Creators: name: Al Muqahwi, Rabab
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2021

description: Abstract Study Title The impact of language communication barriers on non-Arab medical practitioners’ healthcare delivery and ways of addressing miscommunication issues: An exploratory phenomenological study of Bahrain Keywords: Language communication barrier, language challenges, cultural challenges, coping strategies, qualitative research approach, exploratory and phenomenological study. This thesis explores and uncovers the language communication barriers faced by non-Arabic speaking medical practitioners from different fields of specializations and different years of experience. These practitioners work in public or private medical institutions/hospitals in Bahrain (i.e., the context of the research is diverse). The study identified and highlighted language communication challenges and the potential accompanied consequences and effects on medical practitioners’ professions and/ level of medical services provided. This research further aims to come up with a number of potential coping strategies and future support to solve the issue of language communication barrier encountered by non-Arabic speaking medical practitioners when dealing and diagnosing Arab patients in a diverse Arab medical context in the Bahrain Kingdom. This research is an exploratory phenomenological study, and it follows a qualitative approach with the use of a semi-structured interview as a method of data collection involving on a number of non-Arab medical practitioners from different medical specialties and various years of professional experience working in three research sites, represented in three medical hospitals and one higher education medical institution. The main analysis method used for analyzing the collected data is the thematic analysis method (Braun &amp; Clarke, 2006) in addition to using the NVivo software for qualitative data analysis to maximize the accuracy of the data collection analysis results. It is thus expected that the findings of the present study will contribute to first, enhance medical and healthcare services by highlighting both unique and common language communication barriers faced during real- based doctor-patient communication process, resulted consequences of such barriers, learnt coping strategies followed by medical practitioners in their daily clinical practice and recommending practical future coping strategies and solutions. Second, this study further contributes to informing the teaching and learning of Arabic language communication for medical and healthcare purposes as part of the health care studies in higher education and add to higher education context in the field of medical education, for medical and nursing students, academics and for medical practitioners. One further aim, through this study recommendation is that the aim to convey the study message and findings to the medical and healthcare authorities in this study contexts to facilitate the way of establishing new policies, professional training solutions and future projects.