Professor Antoon Cox: 'Interactional dynamics of migrant patient management in the Emergency Dept.'

Описание: This talk (full title: 'Below the surface: Uncovering the interactional dynamics of migrant patient management in the Emergency Department') was given at the 2023 International Symposium for Communication in Healthcare, hosted by the Institute for Communication in Health Care at the Australian National University, 14-15 February 2023.

Abstract: We know that language barriers (LBs) between patients and health care providers have a negative impact on healthcare. In the Emergency Department, where people communicate under cognitive strain and significant asymmetries in background information, LBs give rise to misalignments between actual and perceived quality of communication. Clinicians may on the one hand perceive they have gathered sufficient information for a differential diagnosis, but there is a risk that misunderstandings remain unnoticed during the consultation, sometimes with significant clinical consequences. On the other hand, in those cases where clinicians have collected the necessary information, uncertainty may remain high and lead to additional testing and more protracted consultations. Training on social interaction can help clinicians recognise patterns of potential miscommunication during migrant patient management. This talk will discuss such patterns of interactional dynamics, based on an ethnographic study in the ED, and reflect on how they can be integrated into medical education.

Biography: Antoon Cox is Assistant Professor in Intercultural Communication at Utrecht University. He is also a research fellow at KU Leuven and Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a visiting scholar at the School of Medical Education at King's College London. Since 2023, he is co-chair of the Special Interest Group on "Language and Cultural Discordance in Healthcare
Communication" at the International Association for Communication in Healthcare. Antoon is also a trainer and examiner of community interpreters. His research focuses on interpersonal communication in stressful multilingual settings such as emergency departments and asylum reception centers. It has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as the Translator, Patient Education and Counseling, and Advances in Health Sciences Education.