Bridging Understanding in Medicare: Template for Effective Communication in Indigenous Languages

Abstract

The maintenance of a good patient-doctor relationship, otherwise known as clinical relationship, is central to health care delivery in medical practice. For this reason, the usual practice in medical schools all over the world is to make the attainment of communication skills compulsory for all. A doctors good communication skills, therefore, are a function of the medical vocabulary with which he communicates with his patients. It has been observed that doctors in many African societies, especially in Yorubaland, have mostly conveyed their ideas in medical jargons using the English language, and this inevitably breaches clinical relationships. This article seeks to address the issue by proposing a template for the conveyance of medical terms, in respect of consultation procedures and directional information labels in the hospital environment, in the Yoruba language as a medium of clinical communication. Appealing to concepts embedded in the theory of lexical morphology, this article demonstrates how word formation processes can be used to achieve a Yoruba language template for medical terminologies.