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Savvy healthcare providers learn languages

DETROIT, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- Having healthcare providers speak the same language as their patients translates into less confusion and better quality care, U.S. researchers say.

Study leader Hector Gonzalez of Wayne State University in Detroit says when patients and healthcare providers both speak the same language, patients report better quality care.

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The study, published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, associated speaking the same language with lower likelihoods of confusion, frustration and language-related poor-quality ratings.

"So often we see that healthcare providers and researchers blame patients not fluent in English for not adhering to medical prescriptions and treatments when the problem may be that patients simply don't understand the clinician," Gonzalez says in a statement. "Today, there are more than 60 million Americans who speak languages other than English and that will rapidly grow in coming years. That's a big market that savvy healthcare providers should not ignore."

Gonzalez and colleagues studied data from telephone interviews with 2,921 foreign-born Latino adults, ages 18 and older.

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