“I don’t understand what you’re saying? A literature-based study about nurses’ experiences of the language barrier in healthcare encounters

Background: Language barriers in healthcare encounters have been a long standing problem, jeopardizing the patient safety, satisfaction and the amount of care given to these patients. Interpreters are less available for nurses when compared to physicians, even though nurses rely on communication to perform nursing care. Communication serves as a primary tool for nurses to gather patient data and to explore the patients’ needs. Person-centered care is a nursing theory and an ethical standpoint aiming to see the patient as a whole person. Welcoming the patient narrative, engaging in partnership between nurse and patient and through documentation the nurse performs holistic care and empowers the patient to have control. Aim: To illustrate nurses’ experiences of healthcare encounters with patients where a language barrier exists in the absence of an interpreter. Method: A literature-based study. 19 research articles were included in the analysis and synthesized in the result. Result: The results indicated that nurses experienced problems concerning transferring information to the patient and gathering information from the patient, establishing a nurse-patient relationship, providing emotional support. This led the nurses to use other communication strategies to enable interaction. These were not considered to be sufficient and led to the development of negative emotions. Conclusion: Communication is vital for high quality care. Language barriers hinders nurses in the provision of adequate and ethically sound care. There is a need for more organizational support, more education surrounding how to overcome language barriers and more use of qualified interpreters in nursing care. More research is needed to further explore how to overcome the language barriers and of how and when culture and language are interdependent in healthcare context. Furthermore, research is needed to explore how person-centered care can be used as an ethical and practical tool to overcome the language barrier