Multilingual education: medical interns perceptions regarding the usefulness of non-mother tongue communications skills taught during the undergraduate curriculum.

BACKGROUND: This paper investigates the perceptions of medical interns regarding the usefulness of non-mother tongue communication skills taught during the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. In 2003, the university decided to incorporate Afrikaans and IsiXhosa communication skills into the new MBChB curriculum in order to meet the Faculty of Health Sciences goals to promote quality and equity in healthcare, and to prepare graduating health practitioners for multilingual communities where they would be serving. Despite annual internal evaluations and reviews of the languages courses, the usefulness, if any, of the additional languages in the working clinical environment had not been determined. METHODS: Data were collected during the second year of medical internship across a five-year period through survey questionnaires, as well as focus group interviews conducted in the Western Cape, South Africa. Surveys were conducted from 2009 to 2013. RESULTS: The study shows that the usefulness of each of the probed categories was not consistent across both languages. The interns expressed a need for an overall improvement of the isiXhosa course offering, while the outcomes for the Afrikaans language were more positive across all categories except for cultural understanding. CONCLUSION: The study indicates a positive trend amongst the interns towards developing usefulness in communication skills in Afrikaans and isiXhosa to communicate with their patients.

Measuring the impact of community-based interventions on type 2 diabetes control during the COVID-19 pandemic in Cape Town - A mixed methods study.

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic exposed the risks of poorly controlled noncommunicable diseases, especially in persons with diabetes. The pandemic outbreak in Cape Town, South Africa, required a rapid reorganisation of primary care services. Community-based measures were activated to ensure continuity of care by implementing home delivery of medication by community health workers. After five months of de-escalated chronic care, observations at an urban primary care facility suggested that noncommunicable disease patients had not overtly decompensated despite suspending regular in-facility services. This study attempted to understand what impact de-escalation of regular care and escalation of community-based interventions had on type 2 diabetes patients at this primary care facility. METHODS: A mixed methods study design was used, consisting of data captured prospectively from diabetic patients who returned to the facility for routine care post-lockdown, as well as qualitative interviews to ascertain patients' experiences of the home delivery service. RESULTS: The data set included 331 (72%) patients in the home delivery group and 130 (28%) in the non-home delivery group. Regression analysis demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between home delivery and improved diabetic control (p  0.01), although this may be because of confounding factors. The mean glycaemic control was suboptimal both at baseline and post-lockdown in both groups. Interviews with 83 study patients confirmed the acceptability of the home delivery intervention. CONCLUSION: The rapid reorganisation of primary care services illustrates the versatility of a functional community-oriented primary care service, although not fully developed yet, to adapt to emerging community healthcare needs in the pandemic era.