Ontario and Jennifer Sears

Jennifer Sears: And its not about medical lingo. Based on language data in the Canadian census and medical directories, researchers found a big gap between the number of patients in Ontario who dont speak English or French and the number of doctors who can speak their mother tongues, according to The Star. Its known that the communication between patients and physicians is fundamental to health-care access and delivery, said Jennifer Sears, a researcher in epidemiology and lead author of the recently released study, Potential for Patient-Physician Language Discordance in Ontario and Patients and primary care physicians in Ontario often arent speaking the same language, says a new study by the Centre for Research on Inner City Health . About 18 per cent of the 20,000 primary-care physicians in the province can conduct a conversation in a language other than English or French, and only 3.7 per cent can speak one of the top unofficial languages spoken in Ontario Chinese, Italian, Punjabi, Portuguese and Spanish. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.