Title: PILSen: Practice Interventions for Language Sensitivity: a Pilot Study to
Inform the Delivery of Pharmaceutical Services in Wales
Lead investigator: Llyr Hughes, Community Pharmacist
Co-investigators: Sion Llywelyn, Dr Berwyn Owen, Gwerfyl Roberts (LLAIS),
Professor Fiona Irvine, Professor Margaret Deuchar, Dr Dyfrig Hughes
(WHESS), Professor Ian Russell (NWORTH)
Study Status: Active
Start & End date: February 2009 – August 2009
Type of Study: Pilot study of a randomised controlled trial
Funder: Pharmacy Practice Development Scheme, Welsh Assembly
Government
Amount of Funding: £11,894
Network / ISS contribution: Led by community pharmacist in collaboration
with LLAIS, NWORTH and academic centres of excellence
Lay Summary:
The enhanced role of the patient in treatment decision making has highlighted
the need for effective communication and language awareness in healthcare.
This is of particular relevance in bilingual settings where patients may express
a language preference. In Wales, although most Welsh speakers are
bilingual, when they feel anxious, they often prefer to use Welsh when
communicating with healthcare staff. Moreover, language barriers have been
shown to be detrimental to their health and wellbeing. The effectiveness of
shared decision making may therefore be compromised for Welsh speakers in
the absence of a Welsh language service. This study sets out to explore the
feasibility of establishing a patient preference randomised control trial (RCT)
to investigate the impact of a language concordant intervention on patient
outcomes within the pharmacy setting.
The six month study centres on two community pharmacies in Gwynedd
where 40 Welsh speaking patients eligible for a Medicines Use Review (MUR)
will be invited to be allocated, at random, to a Welsh or English language
consultation. Patients with a strong language preference will be offered the
MUR in the language of their choice. Each consultation will be audio-recorded
and the transcripts subject to corpus linguistic analysis techniques.
Following the MUR, the participants will be invited to complete a series of
demographic questions and three standard outcome measures relating to
medicines use. These measures will be repeated one month later.
Comparisons will be drawn between patient outcomes of a Welsh and English
consultation. Further comparisons of this data with the corpus linguistic
analysis will offer additional insight into the process as well as the outcome of
language concordance in health communication.
The findings of this study will guide the development of a larger RCT that
should inform policy and practice for language planning in healthcare across
other multilingual settings. The enhanced role of the patient in treatment
decision making has highlighted the need for effective communication and
language awareness in healthcare.