By Niki Pham
Food poisoning was the true highlight of my 3rd internship week (June 19th – 23rd, 2017). What was supposed to be a 5-day work week was cut short to 3 because I ate some pork buns with questionably cooked meat. However, the 3 days I did have were still rich with valuable lessons. Of these lessons, I believe the skills I’ve gained in communication have been most impactful on my career as a nurse.
Communication is Key!
Communication had been drilled into me as an essential skill to have even before I began my professional sequence. I had a glimpse of how restrictive a language barrier can be in the healthcare setting when caring for Spanish-speaking only patients during clinical. However, whenever this happened, I always asked a Spanish-speaking classmate for help or phoned the translator to converse with my patient. I never felt helpless considering I had these resources to fall back on.
Without instant access to a fluent translator, or to a friend to translate for me, I was left with just my 2nd grade-level proficiency in Vietnamese, Google translate, and body language to communicate. I’ve found that what Vietnamese I do know allows me to get by and understand simple commands. However, when the doctors and nurses try to explain medical diagnoses to me, it goes through one ear and out the other as ‘gibberish’. Medical terminology in itself is a whole new language; imagine learning it again in a different one! That’s when we whip our phones out and start Googling. It works about half of the time.
Not being able to truly speak the “dominant” language in the country is also frustrating yet humbling. It’s frustrating in that I can’t communicate my thoughts, ideas, or feelings to my patients or my peers. It’s humbling in that I know I will always remember this feeling whenever I see non-English speaking patients struggle to tell me what their needs are in the future. Furthermore, I will remember the patience my peers and patients had when I struggled to find the words to express myself and will give every non-English speaker I encounter the same courtesy for the rest of my life.
Other noteworthy moments this week:
- 1 professor and 5 medical students (year 2) from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota were visiting to collaborate with the Vietnamese physicians to establish several research studies.