Are good intentions good enough? Informed consent without trained interpreters.

Objective: To examine the informed consent process when trained language interpreters are unavailable.

Background: Ensuring sufficient patient understanding for informed consent is especially challenging for patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). While US law requires provision of competent translation for LEP patients, such services are commonly unavailable.

Do notions of risk inform patient choice? Lessons from a study of prenatal genetic counseling.

Risk modeling is an increasingly important part of clinical medicine; however, "risk status" is a complex notion, understood differently by patients and clinicians. Patients' ability to make informed choices about clinical procedures often requires that they interpret risk statistics, which may be difficult to understand and apply. In this article, which is based on a study of prenatal care in South Texas, we consider how notions of risk affect patient decisions about prenatal genetic testing.

Clinical myths of the cultural "other": implications for Latino patient care.

Purpose: Cultural competency is now a requirement in the curriculum of many health professions. However, clinicians' understandings of cultural difference, the accuracy of those understandings, and their impact on patient care have not yet been carefully explored. The authors conducted an ethnographic study designed to describe clinicians' views of Latino culture in the context of amniocentesis decision making, compared those to patients' discussions of their decision making, and explored how clinicians' views about culture are manifested in consultations with Latinas.

The routine and the traumatic in prenatal genetic diagnosis: does clinical information inform patient decision-making?

With the increasing technical sophistication of medicine, clinicians' task of assuring patient informed consent is increasingly elusive. Taking the example of prenatal genetic testing, we examine efforts to communicate the complexities of genetic knowledge and risk calculation to patients. In this qualitative, descriptive study, we interviewed 50 clinicians and 40 patients, and observed 101 genetic counseling sessions.

Exploring loss to follow-up: abnormal Pap screening in Hispanic patients.

Purpose: The loss of patients to follow-up for abnormal findings from Pap screenings is an important public health concern, particularly among poor and minority women. This study explores factors affecting incomplete follow-up among a group of Hispanic women with low incomes.

Description Of Study: A qualitative descriptive study was conducted of 11 Hispanic patients with incomplete Pap smear follow-up at a public clinic in a major city in south Texas.