Transcript
TEACHER:
In Wales, we have two official languages, Welsh being the minority language but it is certainly, in many areas of Wales, a prominent language. There are three areas where having the ability to speak Welsh to your patients is vitally important and that’s in elderly care, in looking after children and in mental health. When people are feeling vulnerable, they do revert to their mother tongue, and even people who are intelligent, are very used to speaking their second language, being English, in everyday work life, even to their partners, when they’re ill, there is a recognised situation where people revert to their mother tongue, where they feel more comfortable.
When people are elderly, it is not unusual to find people who have had a stroke or who have dementia who are only able to speak in Welsh, for example. For young children who are raised in Welsh homes, they’re unable to speak English often until they go to school and if you can’t communicate with your patients, we know and there’s a vast evidence for it, that the treatment they have won’t be optimal. Eighty percent of the diagnosis of an illness comes from the history, and if you’re not able to communicate and obtain that history as well as possible, then that patient is not having their optimal care. For example, if you ask a two-year-old who only speaks Welsh at home ‘where’s it painful?’, they’re unable to tell you unless you ask them in a language they understand. If you ask a patient who’s confused because they don’t understand the language you’re speaking who’s elderly to communicate with you, to take medicine, to just cooperate with instructions in general treatment then they may be classed as even more confused or demented than they actually are. And there have been occasions when people have been admitted to psychiatric institutions because people didn’t understand that they actually couldn’t speak English because of a condition they had.
So, it’s important for those three groups in particular, but it’s important to realise that as Welsh now has equal status to English, the patient should be allowed to speak to healthcare professionals in the language of their choice. We understand that the majority of medial students who come to Wales don’t speak Welsh and we don’t expect them all to end up with a degree in Welsh at the end of their medical school degree, but what we hope that we’ll do with those students is to give them the ability to communicate briefly with a patient and to show respect that they understand that they have a second language. For the students who come from Wales, to medical school in Wales, we hope to give them the confidence to be able to speak professionally and socially to those patients and give them the care that they need and this is important not just at doctor level but also nursing, physiotherapy and receptionist level as well. And by changing that culture, and making sure that students who come through the healthcare studies understand that we’re not judging how good your Welsh is, we’re judging how good the care is for the patient and does the patient receive the care in the language of their choice – and that’s what we’re looking for.
The benefits of studying medicine through the medium of Welsh is that we produce young people who are confident to speak to patients, but also publically in Welsh: to the media, to schools when they go back to inspire another generation of young people. So, we’re generating confident bilingual doctors in Wales, but it’s also beneficial to the patient and whilst we’re looking at benefits to the students in particular with us, we’re looking at the benefits to the wider community, because also by showing that there is somewhere to go with your Welsh medium education then Welsh medium education throughout Wales becomes more valuable and gives a higher status to the Welsh language as well. It gives people the confidence to speak it out of work and out of an academic environment.
It’s been very rewarding so far, two years in, teaching a degree of the medical curriculum through the medium of Welsh. We’ve had small group discussions, we’ve been giving out work books in Welsh and English, we’ve been preparing lectures that we’ve been giving to the whole of the first year through the medium of Welsh using simultaneous translation for those who didn’t understand Welsh. That experience was very new but very rewarding and we received fantastic feedback because if you look at our student body, although everybody speaks English, not everyone who’s bilingual in that year is from Welsh or English homes but also from people from around the world who are from Italian backgrounds, from Gujarati backgrounds. Having a second language, we know, improves your ability of feeling less stressed in new situations, not feeling uncomfortable with strange words and we know that medicine is made up of strange words, of Greek and Latin words, so becoming familiar with a multilingual forum is very useful. These young doctors will be going to international conferences where many languages will be spoken and if we speak Welsh early in the academic career, hearing another language will be no big deal for them in the future so we will hopefully be reducing their stress in these situations, and hopefully when they go out to communities across Wales, seeing Welsh signs and hearing Welsh spoken in clinic won’t be an odd experience for them and won’t make them feel left out or make them feel awkward because Welsh is a living language in Wales and if they’re to become doctors for Wales then they need to understand that they will hear Welsh.