Access to new forms of public healthcare services: patient experiences from interpreter-mediated cardiac rehabilitation

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‘Access to healthcare’ is a complex concept involving dimensions such as service availability, degree of fit between services and service users, outcomes, and equity. Increased linguistic diversity poses challenges for conventional healthcare as well as for new forms of services, such as patients’ Learning and Mastery Services (LMS). According to Norwegian legislation, all patients should have access to the services they need. In practice, the majority of LMS are offered only in Norwegian and are therefore not available for patients with limited proficiency in Norwegian unless interpreting is provided. There are exceptions such as the LMS course “Cardiac Rehabilitation Class–with Interpreting” (CRC-I), which is offered to multilingual groups of patients with serious heart disorders. In this context, this article discusses patients' perspectives on interpreter-mediated communication in CRC-I and their experience considering different dimensions of access based on data from a qualitative study with fieldwork with participant observation and in-depth interviews with participants.