The services currently used to solve communication-related needs between patients who do not speak the host country language and healthcare professionals are not completely effective in most hospitals and most medical professionals will explain that in their consultations with migrants who do not speak their language, they ask them to bring along a family member or friend who can act as an interpreter. The ideal solution to tackle this problem is twofold: on the one hand, the use of professional interpreters and translators from public services trained in interculturalism is necessary to break down language barriers and make communication effective. On the other hand, in order to address the linguistic and cultural asymmetries that impact negatively on patients in terms of inequality, inefficiency and even exclusion, awareness of the importance of intercultural competence should be introduced or increased for healthcare staff.

Multidisciplinary research between the health, language, and communication disciplines is necessary to explore, develop and improve the ways in which healthcare professionals and patients communicate and to achieve an equal society in which migrants have equal access to healthcare. Moreover, clinical consultations studied from a sociocultural perspective can help understand why individuals behave in a certain way (Henderson, Horne, Hills, & Kendall 2018) and how culture (understood as the language, customs, beliefs, rules, arts, knowledge, and collective identities and memories developed by members of a social group) is a major element in human interactions and sets the basis for understanding each other in communicative exchanges.

On the one hand, this proposal pursues to describe the barriers created by intercultural and interlinguistic asymmetries in communication between healthcare providers and female patients, contributing thus to identifying cultural and linguistic discordance to help deal with the challenge of migrant integration and, thus, migrant social justice rights, and their access to health. As previous studies have shown (among others, Kawar 2004; International Migration Report 2015; Chauvin, Simonnot, Vanbiervliet et al. 2015) female migrants are often users with a greater cultural vulnerability (e.g, it is common for Muslim women to have their husbands interpret for them). The number of migrant women is higher in certain clinical areas, such as obstetrics and gynaecology, in which creating a sensitive and respectful environment is of the utmost importance. 

On the other hand, this proposal will give an account of the different assessment models of intercultural competence. There are no models which can be applied to health contexts specifically. We will present a model to measure interculturality in the context of health care for immigrant women, both by professionals, dealing with immigrant women in the field of gynaecology and obstetrics, and also to measure perceived interculturality in healthcare by foreign users.