Specialist Chinese Many patients can not understand their doctor

Many patients feel at the doctor
Many patients complain that they do not feel well cared for by their doctor. Frequently, the lack of time and the technical Chinese of the doctors are the cause. At the German Medical Conference in Frankfurt many physicians agree: The communication between doctor and patient must be better. A challenge for all concerned given the limited time available to talk to the doctor.

Many doctors do not care about the patient's problems due to lack of time
The receptionist will retrieve the patient's name and lead him to the treatment room after waiting for 50 minutes in the waiting room. The patient sits down on his assigned chair and waits another 10 minutes until the doctor enters the room. On the question of the general practitioner, what he misses, the patient answers that he feels flabby and beaten for weeks. Instead of getting to the bottom of the problem, the doctor writes the man ill for three days and advises him to "do something good". Asked what could be the cause of the feeling of malady, the doctor answers already halfway out the door of the treatment room that stress is often the cause. For safety, he would still make a big blood picture. And he's gone - at the next patient. The medical assistant takes a short blood and says goodbye to the man with the words: "We'll contact you if something should be."

When the doctor speaks, patients often only understand "technical Chinese"

Doctor visits like this should not happen. The patient is as baffled as before and does not feel well with his doctor. Even if the patient does not lack anything serious, at least at first glance, the general practitioner suspected a psychological cause - stress - as a reason for the discomfort of the patient. But he barely commented on that in the conversation.

Poor communication between doctor and patient is not faster either
Meanwhile, the doctors see the problem. Due to lack of time, many conversations that would be important for the patient are abbreviated. At the German Medical Conference, which ends this Friday, physicians discuss, among other things, how they could improve their communication with the patient despite little time.

"Deficits exist in medical communication," explains Prof. Ulrich Schwantes in an interview with the news agency "dpa". According to studies, doctors would interrupt their patients on average after eleven to 24 seconds. If they let the patient finish, it would take him an average of 60 to 100 seconds to say anything that seemed important to him in terms of his discomfort. As a result, only one in three in Germany feels well informed by his doctor about opportunities, risks and alternatives to treatment, as a Forsa survey commissioned by Techniker Krankenkasse (TK) recently confirmed. Only 36 percent of the 2001 survey respondents said they were satisfied with the doctor's talk when they were about to receive more serious medical treatment.

"If you are forced to get faster, you can not shorten the treatment, but you can talk to the patient for a shorter time," explains Vice President of the Medical Union Marburger Bund (MB), Andreas Botzlar, to the news agency.

Communication between medical professionals is also often problematic
"There is a lot at stake," says MB boss Rudolf Henke the agency. "The key is that we physicians should not be allowed to be replaced by a more and more sophisticated and specialized medicine." In his experience, bad communication does not get any faster either.

Frequently, however, the communication between medical professionals is "a real problem," reports Andreas Hellmann of the Bavarian Medical Association in conversation with the agency. "The division of labor treatment of patients leads to communication breaks with incalculable consequences for patient care."

The president of the German Medical Association, Ulrich Montgomery, sees another problem in the fact that some foreign physicians have only insufficient knowledge of German. Since the number of physicians who come to Germany from abroad is steadily increasing, the language problem could also be aggravated. "Technical Chinese and lack of German language skills. This is the toxic mixture that many patients receive every day from the medical profession in Germany ", Eugen Brysch from the German Foundation for Patient Protection criticizes the news agency. "In the meantime, patient seminars are being offered throughout Germany so that those affected understand their doctor. That is wrong world. "

According to Schwantes, communication must finally become "a central component in education, training and further education". Moreover, it is also about "a certain attitude: respect, acceptance, empathy".

The initiative "www.washabich.de" of the University of Dresden, which presented itself on the German Medical Day, offers a solution for patients, who have problems with the technical Chinese of the physicians. Since 2011, cooperating students have already been translating doctors' files into normal German 20,000 times, which is understandable to laymen. (Ag)

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