In globalization, Korea is rapidly changing into a multicultural society which includes people of different cultural backgrounds. This study explores the reality of communication between female married immigrants and doctors and how it influences the ...
In globalization, Korea is rapidly changing into a multicultural society which includes people of different cultural backgrounds. This study explores the reality of communication between female married immigrants and doctors and how it influences the overall satisfaction of these patients with regards to medical institutions.
The purpose of the study is as follows. First, it analyzes what kind of awareness doctors have about female married immigrants when they meet in the clinic and how the doctor communicates with female married immigrant patients. Second, it analyzes the attitude of female married immigrants and how they respond to medical staff when they receive medical care. Third, it will identify how doctors’ exposer to other cultures such as foreign language ability, experience of living abroad, and experience with foreign doctors affects their communication with patients from different countries. Fourth, the analysis will provide insights from the intercultural perspective on the issues and conflicts in the communication between doctors and female married immigrant patients. This study suggests that doctors need to better understand the patients with different cultural backgrounds so that the female married immigrant patients receive comprehensive care through effective communication.
In this study, 11 medical doctors were interviewed from the Department of Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Pediatrics in the primary and secondary medical institutions in Seoul, Gyeonggi and Incheon from March to May 2019. The responses were examined by the conventional content analysis method.
The results of this study are as follows.
First, due to the language barrier, doctors and female married immigrants experience ambiguity in communication during the medical care. The doctors focuses on solving patients' health problems using all their knowledge, so they tend to overlook the dissatisfaction of female married immigrant patients who find themselves difficult to express their medical needs. Doctors have difficulties in the treatment of domestic patients who act rudely because of low medical threshold or dissatisfied with medical outcomes. On the other hand, doctors feel that it is relatively straightforward to treat married immigrant women who have ambiguity in communication because of language barriers. The doctors tend to only focus on medical procedures without considering possibility of mistreatment due to the miscommunication with the foreign patients.
Instead of ignoring the ambiguity of communication with a purely scientific approach, doctors should first understand their patients with a wholistic approach by understanding their patient’s cultural affiliation. It’s also necessary for doctors to be equipped with communication skills and intercultural competence so that they can communicate effectively and appropriately with foreign patients, especially the female married immigrants whose population has been increasing significantly over the years.
Second, doctors should be able to recognize and resolve conflicts with foreign patients which can be due to cultural differences. They need to know the causes precisely in order to solve the conflicts that foreign patients experience due to social cultural differences. For this purpose, doctors’ practical knowledge of the patients’ social cultural background is needed. Conflicts due to differences can cause misunderstanding because they do not have mutual knowledge, and these conflicts are likely to be replicated in other treatments rather than being an one-time event, which can result in medical dispute.
In order to solve the cultural and emotional conflict, doctors need have a polite and courteous attitude toward female married immigrants patients. They need to have knowledge and understanding on the medical system of the foreign patient’s native country since misunderstanding can happen due to the difference of two medical systems. While treating female married immigrant patients who have different medical concepts, the doctor needs to be open minded to understand the medical concept of the patients and should actively communicate with the patient during each step of the medical procedure.
Third, doctors’ exposer to different cultural experiences is helpful in lowering medical barriers and establishing a better medical treatment strategy for female married immigrant patients, but it does not seem to have a big effect on the idea that domestic medical treatment and foreign medical treatment are the same. The doctors are trained for a long-term patient care, and the initial barriers to treatment have been lowered, making it easier to treat foreign patients, so the linguistic and cultural barriers of the female married immigrants can be overlooked during the care.
The foreign culture experiences like foreign language ability, foreign travel, interest in foreign countries, foreign residency, and use of foreign medical institutions have a positive effect on lowering the barriers to the medical treatment of female married immigrants and establishing a better treatment strategy. However, there is a limit to rely on the 'personal experience of other cultures' to improve the quality of medical consultation with foreign patients in Korea which has been rapidly transformed into a multicultural society. Therefore, it’s necessary to implement and sustain a system for doctors to obtain ‘professional experience of other cultures’ through foreign patient medical education and intercultural competence education.
Fourth, the doctor can feel uncomfortable when treating patients whose language and skin color are different from his or her own at the initial stage of treatment. This happens often during the interaction with a female married immigrant who is married to a Korean man and gave birth to a child. The use of the mother tongue of female married immigrants in their family depends on the attitude of the family. Female marriage immigrants share or hide their country of origin depending on the political or social status of their country of origin. The female married immigrant comes to the doctor’s appointment with her Korean spouse who helps positive communication. However, some Korean spouses are indifferent or uncooperative, making it difficult for a doctor to proceed.
Pediatricians are actively in favor of bilingual use. They suggest ways to help the children of multicultural family whose language development can be slow because they use both mother’s language and Korean language. This study reveals that pediatricians can act as mediators for the members of multicultural families so that children in those families can grow as bilingual speakers in a multicultural society.