Strategies for improved French-language health services: Perspectives of family physicians in northeastern Ontario.

OBJECTIVE: To identify strategies to improve the quality of health services for Francophone patients.
DESIGN: A series of semistructured key informant interviews.
SETTING: Northeastern Ontario. Participants A total of 18 physicians were interviewed. Ten physicians were interviewed in French, 7 physicians were women, and 10 physicians were located in urban communities.
METHODS: Purposive and snowball sampling strategies were used to conduct a series of semistructured key informant interviews with family physicians practising in communities with a large Francophone population. Principles of grounded theory were applied, guided by a framework for patient-professional communication. Results were inductively derived following an iterative data collection–data analysis process and were analyzed using a detailed thematic approach. MAIN
FINDINGS: Respondents identified several strategies for providing high-quality French-language health services. Some were unique to non–French-speaking physicians (eg, using appropriate interpreter services), some were unique to French-speaking physicians (eg, using a flexible dialect), and some strategies were common to all physicians serving French populations (eg, hiring bilingual staff or having pamphlets and posters in both French and English).
CONCLUSION: Physicians interviewed for this study provided high-quality health care by attributing substantial importance to effective communication. While linguistic patient-to-physician concordance is ideal, it might not always be possible. Thus, conscious efforts to attenuate communication barriers are necessary, and several effective strategies exist.