Helping midwives treat non English speakers

Hózhó has been co-creating a tool with clinical staff to be used in the field by Midwives, to enable them to better communicate with non-English speakers.

The brief

This exciting project came about as part of the Connected Healthcare Challenge, supported by TechNorth and the Yorkshire and Humber Academic Health Science Network.

Our brief was to “Provide a translation tool to help midwives better treat patients who don’t speak English as a first language.”

Background

• The NHS Trust’s community has become increasingly diverse over the last five years
• As such, midwives are now caring for a large number of ladies who do not speak English as a first language / at all
• The team feel that they are giving a ‘two tier’ service and want to address this
• Midwives use medical terminology and there are nuances to communicate which can be quite complicated for women’s understanding
• Feedback from user groups and Picker surveys indicate the importance of personalised care and the team want to get better at this

Understanding the audience

• Two key audiences to consider
  • The patient
  • The midwife
• Discussed different communities in Barnsley and when women come into contact with health services
• Mapped service interactions

Insight from interviews with midwives

• Women often come to appointments accompanied by a spouse or mother
• When there is a language barrier, often this person can act as an interpreter
• It can be difficult to know if the patient’s words are being accurately reported

“She talks for ages and then her husband says ‘she’s fine’ and you don’t know if that’s what she said or he’s got his own ideas, you don’t know what the relationship dynamics are.

In some cultures they just don’t like talking about bodies, but you always worry you’re not being told what the person really said.”

And then?

We’ve used all the insight to design a product, which we’ve prototyped at low resolution. Our next steps are to test it out on some users…