To ‘Get by’ or ‘get help’? A qualitative study of physicians’ challenges and dilemmas when patients have limited English proficiency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Encounters between patients and physicians who do not speak the same language are relatively common in Canada, particularly in urban settings; this trend is increasing worldwide. Language discordance has important effects on health outcomes, including mortality. This study sought to explore physicians' experiences of care provision in situations of language discordance in depth. DESIGN: Qualitative study based on individual interviews. Interview guides elicited physicians' perspectives on how they determined whether communication could proceed unaided. A descriptive qualitative approach was adopted, entailing inductive thematic analysis. PARTICIPANTS: 22 physicians experienced in treating patients in situations of language discordance were recruited from the emergency and internal medicine departments of an urban tertiary-care hospital. SETTING: Large, inner-city teaching hospital in Toronto, Canada, one of the most linguistically diverse cities internationally. RESULTS: Determining when to 'get by' or 'get help' in order to facilitate communication was described as a fluid and variable process. Deciding which strategy to use depended on three inter-related factors: time/time constraints, acuity of situation and ease of use/availability of translation aids. Participants reported at times feeling conflicted about their decisions, portraying some of these clinical encounters as a 'troubling space' in which they experienced one or more dilemmas related to real versus ideal practice, responsibility and informed consent. CONCLUSIONS: In situations of language discordance, a physician's decision to 'get by' (vs 'get help') rests on a judgement of whether communication can be considered 'good enough' to proceed and depends on the circumstances of the specific encounter. The tension set up between what is 'ideal' and what is practically possible can be experienced as a dilemma by physicians. The study's findings have implications for practice and policy not only in Canada but in other multilingual settings, and indicate that physicians require greater support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".