Patients living in linguistically discordant long-term care homes in Ontario are at higher odds of being inappropriately prescribed psychosis medication, says a new University of Ottawa study highlighting the importance of delivering care in the patient’s preferred language.

Researchers from the University of Ottawa’s Department of Family Medicine and the Institut de Savoir Montfort concluded Francophone and allophone residents were more likely to experience inappropriate prescription of antipsychotics compared to English-language patients in a similar setting. Linguistic discordance occurs when care cannot be delivered in a patient’s preferred language.

“The findings of this study add to the growing body of evidence supporting the notion that language discordance is a social determinant of health contributing to adverse events and poor patient outcomes,” says lead author Dr. Lise Bjerre, who alongside Dr. Peter Tanuseputro, conducted the population-based study of nearly 200,000 long-term care residents in Ontario over the span of nearly a decade.

“The findings highlight the importance of having a diverse workforce capable of delivering culturally and linguistically concordant care.”

The paper is published in the journal BMC Geriatrics,

According to Dr. Bjerre, the effects of language barriers could be mitigated by:

• Asking individuals to specify their preferred language, which could be achieved by having this information on the patient’s health card.
• Modifying processes to favor matching of patients to facilities and providers who can provide care in residents’ preferred language.
• Ensuring multilingual staff and/or trained interpreters are readily available.
• Training staff in French to better serve official language minority communities across the country (such as the program exists at uOttawa’s School of Pharmacy).

“Furthermore, collecting language data at the population level for both patients and health care providers—for example, by including the patient’s preferred language on the health care card, which is done in some provinces (Prince Edward Island) would facilitate evaluating the provision of language-concordant health care and how it relates to patient outcomes in different settings,” adds Dr. Bjerre, the University of Ottawa and Institut du Savoir Montfort Chair in Family.