Adopting a critical intercultural communication approach to understanding health professionals' encounter with ethnic minority patients

Abstract

Even in the Scandinavian countries, where welfare resources such as education and healthcare are offered wholly or partly free of charge, health disparities between the majority populations and ethnic minority groups challenge the national healthcare systems. The knowledge levels of health professionals and their approach to ethnic minority patients influence the accessibility of healthcare and availability of health prevention resources of ethnic minorities. When adapting healthcare practice to minority patients, healthcare professionals draw on insights from intercultural communication and anthropology. However, within these disciplines such concepts as culture, interculturality, and ethnicity are subjected to contestation due to co-existing, but competing paradigms. This paper demonstrates how healthcare discourses on ethnic minority patients reflect shifting intercultural communication paradigms and advocates the adoption of a critical intercultural communication approach in relation to ethnicity-based health inequality.