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Biomedical subjects

J R Betancourt

Publications and source records attributed to J R Betancourt.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Language barriers to informed consent and confidentiality: the impact on women's health.

Obtaining informed consent and maintaining confidentiality are critical to the way we practice medicine and remain a crucial part of our medicolegal responsibility to the patient and to society. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to these topics in populations who may have limited English proficiency. Despite research suggesting that language barriers have direct effects on health and health care delivery, many health care settings do not provide professionally trained interpreters to patients who need them. This is clearly a challenge that will only grow as our nation becomes more diverse. Perhaps nowhere is this issue more significant than in women's health, given the very personal and sensitive nature of the medical exams and interventions. As health care providers, we must conduct and facilitate research on how language barriers compromise quality of care, and we must advocate for systems and policy change.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The challenges of cross-cultural healthcare--diversity, ethics, and the medical encounter.

Difficulties in the provider-patient relationship arise from many sources, and pose various challenges to the integrity of the medical encounter. When these issues are especially sensitive or important to the patient's health and well-being, a complete breakdown in the therapeutic relationship may result. The goal of the emerging field of cross-cultural healthcare is to improve providers' ability to understand, communicate with, and care for patients from diverse backgrounds. We should weave the concepts of cross-cultural care into the ethics of caring if we truly hope to have a positive impact on the health status of diverse patient populations.

Aged↗
PubMed1999

Cross-cultural primary care: a patient-based approach.

In today's multicultural society, assuring quality health care for all persons requires that physicians understand how each patient's sociocultural background affects his or her health beliefs and behaviors. Cross-cultural curricula have been developed to address these issues but are not widely used in medical education. Many curricula take a categorical and potentially stereotypic approach to "cultural competence" that weds patients of certain cultures to a set of specific, unifying characteristics. In addition, curricula frequently overlook the importance of social factors on the cross-cultural encounter. This paper discusses a patient-based cross-cultural curriculum for residents and medical students that teaches a framework for analysis of the individual patient's social context and cultural health beliefs and behaviors. The curriculum consists of five thematic units taught in four 2-hour sessions. The goal is to help physicians avoid cultural generalizations while improving their ability to understand, communicate with, and care for patients from diverse backgrounds.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Hypertension in multicultural and minority populations: linking communication to compliance.

Cardiovascular disease disproportionately affects minority populations, in part because of multiple sociocultural factors that directly affect compliance with antihypertensive medication regimens. Compliance is a complex health behavior determined by a variety of socioeconomic, individual, familial, and cultural factors. In general, provider-patient communication has been shown to be linked to patient satisfaction, compliance, and health outcomes. In multicultural and minority populations, the issue of communication may play an even larger role because of linguistic and contextual barriers that preclude effective provider-patient communication. These factors may further limit compliance. The ESFT Model for Communication and Compliance is an individual, patient-based communication tool that allows for screening for barriers to compliance and illustrates strategies for interventions that might improve outcomes for all hypertensive patients.

Communication Barriers↗