Abstract
The article analyzes the impact of language barriers on the medical treatment of foreign-speaking patients and illustrates that the absence of systemic, institutional responses to language barriers in healthcare facilities exacerbates racist attitudes toward migrants and ethnic groups. The article is based on 201 interviews with healthcare workers, employees of public or non-governmental institutions as well as users of healthcare services that were conducted between 2018 and 2019 in twelve local communities in Slovenia. Following the methodological and conceptual framework, the first part of the article highlights the various negative consequences of language barriers experienced by healthcare workers and foreign-speaking patients. The second part shows that in the absence of an accessible network of professional intercultural mediators or interpreters, healthcare workers are left to their own devices with respect to overcoming language barriers. Finally, the last part of the article shows that many interlocutors are increasingly searching for the culprit for this situation. Some healthcare workers attribute the responsibility to the abstract concept of the “system”, while others attribute the responsibility exclusively to migrants, thus perpetuating key elements of the culture of racism present in Slovenia. In this culture of racism, knowledge of Slovene language becomes one of the most important criteria that distinguishes deserving from undeserving migrants. The latter are a privileged object of racist responses at the level of cultural, institutional and personal racism, which is proving to be mutually toxic.
Highlights
It is common knowledge that migrants and ethnic minorities face numerous inequities in health and healthcare in many countries, including in Europe
The article addresses the question that many interlocutors in healthcare institutions ask themselves: who is responsible for the situation in which healthcare workers and foreignspeaking patients are left to their own devices in order to overcome language barriers?
Refugees from the Middle East, Asia and African regions are present in Slovene territory. These people, as we shall see in the following pages, are extensively exposed to language barriers in the Slovenian healthcare system, which is true for many Albanianspeaking persons, who are moving to Slovenia in large numbers, especially from Kosovo6 (Kržišnik-Bukić 2008; Vadnjal 2014; Škraban 2020; Škraban et al 2020)
Summary
It is common knowledge that migrants and ethnic minorities face numerous inequities in health and healthcare in many countries, including in Europe. Considering that culture has become a signifier of otherness, migrants have become the object of racism even when they do not differ in appearance from the dominant group This notion of “differences” may extend to the fields of legal status, housing, employment, health insurance, religious beliefs and, as we shall shortly see, language. The present article aims to demonstrate how cultural racism, which is becoming increasingly present in relation to migrants and ethnic minorities in Slovenia, promotes institutional racism and is reflected in individual racist perceptions of some healthcare workers. The article analyzes the impact of language barriers on the medical treatment of foreign-speaking patients and illustrates that the absence of systemic, institutional responses to language barriers in healthcare facilities exacerbates racist attitudes toward migrants and ethnic groups. The article addresses the question that many interlocutors in healthcare institutions ask themselves: who is responsible for the situation in which healthcare workers and foreignspeaking patients are left to their own devices in order to overcome language barriers?
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