Language barriers impact prehospital care

Emergency medical services (EMS) rely on accurate and efficient communication. The impact of language discordance between EMS providers and their patients on EMS decision-making has not been well-studied, nor have the strategies that EMS providers use to overcome language barriers. This thesis presents a body of scholarly work investigating the prior research on language barriers in the prehospital setting, the application of mixed methods to prehospital research, and the results of an international, multi-site, mixed methods study of the impact of language barriers on prehospital care. EMS providers struggle with a lack of language assistance resources that are appropriate for the fast-paced, rugged environment in which they work and use similar adaptive strategies to communicate with language discordant patients in a variety of contexts. Furthermore, language barriers introduce uncertainty which results in more conservative and resource-intensive decision-making. Future directions for research include developing language assistance resources that are adapted to field use and studying patient- and system-level outcomes related to language barriers.Valente Family FundBiomedical SciencesMastersUniversity of New Mexico. Biomedical Sciences Graduate ProgramSussman, AndrewMishra, ShirazMoore, Bria