While working as a medical student in Tbilisi, Georgia, one issue that I faced during my early years. The patient didn’t know English, and I didn’t know Kartuli (Georgian).
When I started interacting with patients, it was broken words and barely understandable to them. Lucky for me, my senior doctors helped me translate while I documented the patient’s medical history.
By the end of my rotational journey, I’ve learnt the language that was enough for me to understand the symptoms up to 70%
For all the FMGs and Indian graduates, have you faced this problem while you worked and studied in different countries or different indian states??
In USA, some patients are just Spanish speaking. So if we don’t know Spanish, it becomes a barrier in providing effective care. Translate is available, but still.
In India, we have various languages in different regions. As a person who speaks only Hindi and English, being posted for medical rotations in Himachal Pradesh came with an unexpected challenge—language. While Hindi is widely understood, many patients, especially in rural areas, speak Pahadi dialects. During rounds or history-taking, I often found it difficult to fully understand their concerns or symptoms. It felt frustrating to rely on attendants or nurses for translation, especially when building trust with patients is so vital in medicine. This experience made me realize how language can become a real barrier in delivering effective healthcare, and the importance of local language familiarity in clinical practice.
I also felt language as an obstacle to some extent, as my mother tongue is malayalam but I am studying in chennai. So with interacting with patients as for history taking I felt difficulty during the initial time of clinical posting. They will speak in native tamil speedly at that time I felt difficulty in catching up those words. But as of now, till 2 years I interact with friends in tamil and studied the important words used for diagnosis and thus improved much better and still studying.
They will also sometimes look at my face and be stucked by hearing my tamil as there is no proper accent and which make them easily to understand me as non-tamilian😅.
Certainly i saw many of my telgu batchmates find it very difficult to communicate with Hindi speaking pateint and always end up with frustration and loss of confidence
Same may be applied for abroad students