Access to Care and its Relationship with Misdiagnosis

DESCRIBE A CLINICAL PROBLEM IN YOUR PRACTICE SETTING AND EXPLAIN WHY IT IS A PROBLEM WARRANTING A CHANGE TO IMPACT PATIENT AND OR ORGANIZATIONAL OUTCOMES.
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The first step in any medical therapy or intervention is to gain access to care. Patients must be able to communicate with providers in their understandable language to get care (Orenstein, 2015). This is especially true in the treatment of psychiatric disorders, where clinical symptomatology assessments rely primarily on verbal contact between patients and medical personnel. As a result, a lack of language proficiency is likely to result in treatment delays, insufficient care, and misdiagnosis (Orenstein, 2015). In this instance, we will look at how a language barrier has led to misdiagnosis in nursing homes through the lens of a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, and we will propose a solution.
Misdiagnosis in this situation refers to a person having one medical ailment being diagnosed by a psychiatrist with a condition that they do not have. A good example can be a nursing mother with inflammatory breast cancer being informed she has mastitis and given antibiotics, or a young stroke patient being diagnosed with vertigo, disorientation, or alcohol intoxication. The worst-case scenario for misdiagnosis is that treating the wrong diseases might make patients sicker or kill them, or postpone the diagnosis of the true problem until it is too late to cure it successfully. The best-case scenario is that it causes considerable frustration as well as a loss of time and money for both the doctor and the patient. Unfortunately, a misunderstanding between the doctor and the patient has resulted in misdiagnosis within the home setting nursing healthcare system. Exposing patients to the likeliness of receiving the worst health care and not understanding their diagnosis and therapy provided by their physician. All these are facilitated by the language barrier that can be fueled by different factors of social life and health.
For example, language barriers between patients and psychiatrists might be caused by natural or mental issues. The patient can be said to have a different language from the psyc...