Limited efficiency with the English language is a barrier to medical comprehension and increases the risk of adverse medication reactions, according to a recent study led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.
The UCSF study, which appears in the online version of the Journal of General Internal Medicine on August 1, is the first multilingual, population-based study to focus on the impact of English proficiency and physician language on medical comprehension.
"Looking at a broad population of respondents with various native languages, we found English proficiency is an independent risk factor for difficulty in understanding medical situations and reporting problems with medications," said lead author Elisabeth Wilson, MD, MPH, research fellow and clinical instructor of medicine at UCSF.
According to the study, respondents who were limited in their English proficiency were significantly more likely to report problems understanding a medical situation, experience confusion about how to use medication, have trouble understanding labels on medications, and suffer a bad reaction to medication due to problems understanding instructions.
Researchers conducted a telephone survey with 1200 Californians in 11 different languages – Russian, Spanish, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Farsi, Armenian, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Korean, Tagalog (Philippines) and Mien (Hmong). Of the respondents, 49 percent were defined as being limited English-proficient (LEP). Respondents were defined as LEP if they responded "not well" or "not at all" to the question, "How well do you understand English?" The comprehensive survey included 48 questions ranging from health care access to satisfaction to comprehension.
Data also revealed more than two-thirds (69 percent) of LEP respondents reported that their physicians spoke their native language, yet they were still significantly more likely to report problems understanding a medical situation than English-proficient respondents.