Maintaining interaction with patients to deliver highly skilled care is an essential aspect of nursing practice in any clinical setting. Hence, honing communication and engagement skills is crucial for nursing staff to establish productive interactions with target audiences. According to Pung and Goh (2017), one of the limitations of communication in a multicultural environment is the language barrier that manifests itself in the direct interaction of nurses with patients and in the engagement work in the care process. Junior medical specialists working abroad experience these difficulties acutely. The scope of this work includes the assessment of communication challenges between nursing staff and patients with type 2 diabetes, in particular, ensuring adequate self-management education support.
Failure to establish productive communication due to the language barrier affects the quality of care. As Almualem, Darwish, and AlFaraj (2021) state, anxiety is one of the manifestations of poor interaction since patients cannot receive good advice or support if a healthcare professional cannot explain specific nuances of treatment or care verbally. Communication is critical in determining nursing qualifications (Ali & Watson, 2018). Saudi Arabia, an advanced country with modern healthcare and labor-intensive approaches, is the state in which Arabic is the official language. In this regard, foreign specialists with insufficient language training are forced to experience challenges, which manifests itself sharply in patient-provider interaction. As Alshammari, Duff, and Guilhermino (2019) argue, “the barriers to effective nurse-patient communication adversely effects patient safety and patient satisfaction” (p. 1). Therefore, addressing this limitation is of high importance in the context of promoting a high level of healthcare services.
The purpose of this paper is to present the experience of foreign nurses working in Saudi Arabia with patients with type 2 diabetes. The personal views of the participants involved will be used as a rationale for collecting data on the language barrier and engagement challenges. Establishing interaction with the target audience is a prerequisite for patient adherence to care guidelines (Mani & Abutaleb, 2017). In this clinical setting, following nurses’ recommendations is of great importance. In particular, blood sugar monitoring and diet control are mandatory procedures for the audience with the disease in question. However, due to the lack of productive interaction caused by communication gaps, some patients feel distrust of the professionalism of the staff, which manifests itself in the unwillingness to perform the prescribed procedures responsibly and timely. Bit-Lian, Bakar, and Saeidin (2020) highlight the identity of Saudi culture and its commitment to traditions and indigenous behaviors. As a result, the foreign background of the nurses involved as the participants is a deterrent to productive communication.
The assessment of the existing constraints and barriers can reveal the root causes and prerequisites for patients’ reluctance to follow the recommendations of nursing staff. Self-management education support is an aspect to enhance to provide a higher quality of care and create an enabling environment for the well-being of targeted patients. The Arabic language training courses can be ineffective for nurses in gaining sufficient knowledge to interact with the community. Therefore, addressing the language barrier is seen as one of the crucial measures to improve the quality of provider-patient communication and create a productive care environment, which is relevant to the treatment of type 2 diabetes as a disease that requires the constant monitoring of health indicators and compliance with medical prescriptions.
References
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