Spanish-Only Speaking Patients: A Case Study

One of the deepest fears human beings experience is the inability to communicate one’s needs. How difficult must be to be surrounded by complete estrangers whom don’t understand your language neither can satisfy your needs. Another of the deepest fears of human beings is to face an illness, injury, or trauma. As a nurse working in a multicultural county with a large percentage of the population not speaking English, I encounter everyday reckless faces of patients and families that can communicate theirs needs in time of misfortune. I am fortunate enough to be bilingual and to experience the ultimate satisfaction of communicate with the Spanish-only speaking patients in their own language. I have been able to see reckless painful and distressed
Neil Lister (2015) states: “Because of the complications caused by the language barrier, we had to rely on body posture and body language to communicate, sometimes with good results, but sometimes not.” The most important part of the nursing process happens to the comprehensive assessment. Sharon Jensen (2011) describes health assessment as the process of “gathering information about the health status of the patient, analyzing and synthesizing those data, making judgements about nursing interventions based on the findings, and evaluating patient care outcomes.” In other words, the health assessment is not only the first step or part of the nursing process but it is the cornerstone of the nursing process. How difficult and inaccurate would be to rely only on body posture and body language to gather information from a perhaps depressed or mentally impaired patient? In addition to the obstacles that language barrier imposes on the health assessment, it limits the necessary therapeutic communication that must be carry out with these specific
Throughout the elaboration of this assignment I learned to search for keywords and phrases that narrow the available sources to what was pertinent to my topic. I could have spent thousand hours browsing the uncountable materials related to communication barrier, but by searching for the term “language barrier in nursing” I could read only those articles that potentially could be used in my assignment.

The topic of my choice was not a difficult one. There is plenty of interesting materials, books, journals, and articles that document the impact of language barrier in the nursing process and the availability of those material made my assignment not so