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Is there a better way to say 'opportunistic infection'?
Iolhivaids
2008-07-04
Cape Town - After more than a quarter of a century of the AIDS pandemic, there is an extensive lexicon of jargon associated with HIV infection, but this has not made it any easier for doctors to communicate with their patients.
Linguists at
South Africa
's
University
of
Stellenbosch
are beginning to analyse the interactions between patients and doctors at
selected sites in the country's
Western Cape Province
, and have found that many doctors are uncomfortable talking about deeply
personal subjects such as sex and sexuality. After recording conversations
between doctors and their patients, linguist Christine Anthonissen and her team
found that physicians were sometimes vague, omitted difficult topics, or spoke
in a manner aimed at reducing any tension a patient might have been feeling
during the visit. Speaking on Wednesday at the opening of the 6th annual
Communication, Medicine and Ethics Conference (COMET) in
South Africa
's southern city of
Cape Town
, she said part of the obfuscation by doctors was to mask their own discomfort.
"Some doctors are still very awkward at dealing with something that's not
about pills or fixing a broken arm, but about moving closer to a patient and
talking about things like lifestyle," said Anthonissen, who suggested it
could be helpful to require all South African physicians to have some training
in HIV counselling. Further research by the university has shown that more than
a decade after apartheid, many South African doctors continue to consult
primarily in English or Afrikaans at best, these are the second languages of
most South Africans. To bridge this gap, doctors often leaned on already
overburdened nurses who might be able to speak one of the country's other nine
official languages, but nurses were reluctant to add additional and unpaid
duties to their workloads, Anthonissen said. At one
Western Cape
clinic, the problem has been solved by using HIV-positive counsellors from a
local non-governmental organisation. Berna Gerber, another Stellenbosch
researcher who analysed a small set of interactions between doctors, clients and
these counsellors, found that most patients thought them a positive addition to
the clinic.
Gerber said the counsellors not only translated the doctors comments from
English into isiXhosa, but were also able to provide counselling to patients
while they translated.Using community-based counsellors as translators could
alleviate the shortage of professionally trained translators in government
health facilities, while providing patients with additional access to HIV and
Aids services, such as support groups, Anthonissen suggested. "The truth
is, there are not going to be enough trained interpreters in the near future,
and this may be the way to go," she said. "It's an employment
opportunity for them, and they do an incredible job."
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