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.