Intercultural and interlinguistical mediation in the healthcare system: the challenge of conflict management

Nowadays, young women and their children are the most important migrant users of healthcare services. In particular, these people may encounter different cultural constructions of health, disease, therapy, motherhood. The observed difficulties in intercultural communication encourage healthcare systems to promote mediation. Mediation consists in the intervention of a third person, who promotes reciprocal understanding and acceptance between participants.The research we are presenting focuses on intercultural communication which is produced in these services between healthcare personnel and migrant patients. To achieve this goal our research aims at integrating different theoretical and methodological approaches: conversation analysis, in order to observe the interaction between healthcare personnel, pointing out the cues of the participants' turn-taking sequences; analysis of the cultural presuppositions of the healthcare system as a communication system with a specific function in society, by highlighting contextualization cues, that is, cultural presuppositions that steer interaction system, which result from the wider social context, and which are cues of the cultural identities that characterize it. I observed that in most cases the patients have very few opportunities to answer to the physicians’ questions or to pose questions or doubts. Substituting the patients as main participants in interactions, the mediator never refuses the physicians’ indications, never expresses doubts, never asks to the patients if they have some reason to doubt or refuse. In these cases interlinguistic and intercultural mediation de-emphasises the importance of the larger social context, of the durability of relationships between the parties, of their political recognition.

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Original scientific paper: Interkulturno i interlingvističko posredovanje u zdravstvenom sustavu: izazov u upravljanju sukobom.