Objective: To describe communication strategies for clinical practice that allow practitioners to work more effectively with marginalised population groups and to discuss how to incorporate these into medical practice.
Methods: Active practitioners working in inclusion health and people with lived experience of homelessness and the asylum-seeking process shared their perspectives in the symposium at the 2022 International Conference on Communication in Healthcare (ICCH) and a subsequent conference on empathy in healthcare. The views of attendees were sought.
Symposium discussion: We describe the perspectives shared at the symposia under two main themes: communication needs in people experiencing homelessness and migrant populations, and trauma-informed practice.
Conclusions: People experiencing homelessness have more communication challenges compared to the general adult population. Migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking populations also face the complexity of negotiating unfamiliar healthcare, legal and social systems with the added burden of language barriers. Trauma-informed practice provides a useful framework that can improve communication with these groups.
Keywords: Asylum Seekers; Communication; Homelessness; Inclusion Healthcare; Interpreters; Refugees; Trauma Informed Practice.
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.