Threaten Health and Safety Imagine being brought into an emergency room and being unable to describe to the doctor what is wrong, or not going to the doctor because you are worried you wonit be able to answer his or her questions. Imagine being prescribed a medicine and not understanding how to take it, or staring at the shelf in a pharmacy or grocery store and being confused about which medicine to purchase for your child. These are precisely the problems faced by many ESL students. A recent study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine showed that people who have difficulty reading or understanding health-related materials are more than twice as likely to end up in a hospital as those who donit. This can be caused by simply not knowing the number of pills to take or not understanding the drug interactions that accompany their prescriptions.
Language barriers can also cause frustration in hospital settings.
In another survey reported in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, non-English speakers were less satisfied with their care in the emergency room, less willing to return to the same emergency room if they had a problem they felt required emergency care, and reported more problems with emergency care. In many cases, these problems occur because of communication gaps between patients and health care professionals. For example, some hospitals use interpreters to facilitate doctor-patient communications. Another tactic used by many pharmacists is to provide instruction sheets in Spanish and other languages when distributing prescription medication. This program encourages the inclusion of health-related topics into ESL classrooms across the United States.