Language and Medicine Interaction in Iraqi Kurdistan Region

Abstract

This study touches upon language and medicine interaction in Iraqi Kurdistan where the medium of communication in the medical setting is found to be very complicated since most of the senior staff prefer using English while the majority of junior staff particularly nurses and medical assistants are not qualified enough to use English especially when they communicate with doctors or when they get involved in medical issues related to the treatment of patients and this might probably affect negatively on their performance. That is, English is widely used by the doctors especially during their study in the College of Medicine and this will definitely affect their performance after their graduation particularly when they find themselves enforced to use Kurdish for speaking and treating their patients who use different Kurdish varieties for speaking. Likewise, the medical junior staff in general and nurses in particular are found to face some challenges in terms of using English. This study is of great significance since it aims at showing the impact of communication between the medical staff and the patients on one hand and among each other on the other hand. This research adopts quantitative approach to arrive at sufficient results through collecting data related to the contribution of participants to the medical setting. This paper is confined to the linguistic communicative problems of the medical staff mainly including nurses from College of Nursing-Medical University of Erbil and Koya during their dealing with patients and other related medical issues. In brief, this study concludes that having no explicit language policy in the health sector of Iraqi Kurdistan Region affects the performance of the linguistic communication of the medical staff in one way or another. Meanwhile, the findings of the research will hopefully be beneficial for pedagogical implication in enhancing the status of Kurdish language and improving teaching of English language skills.