Language of Healthcare: Chain of Education to Reduce Barriers

Background: Many health professional students in Arabic-speaking countries face a linguistic transition when advancing from high school to health professional school, as the language of instruction changes from their native language Arabic, to English. This change presents a barrier as it might limit their ability to understand core health concepts taught in the medical school, or even access third-party educational resources which are available only in English. This study examines the impact of Arabic captioned educational videos on comprehension and academic performance among Arabic-speaking health professional students. Methods: To reduce language barriers faced by Arabic-speaking students using English-language content, Arabic captions were created for freely available Osmosis videos on their YouTube channel. Chain of Education partnered with Osmosis from Elsevier to assemble a team of qualified healthcare students and professionals fluent in both Arabic and English who captioned the videos. We investigated the efficacy of this intervention in improving Arabic-speaking healthcare students’ retention of material and access to educational opportunities. We performed research on a convenience sample of 82 students solicited through the partnership, who completed a confidential survey via Google Forms . Findings: Response rate was 65%, the majority of whom were medical students. Of respondents, 83% self-reported their understanding of healthcare concepts as greatly improved. Interpretation: Our findings suggest that providing Arabic captions for English-language medical content enhances self-reported confidence and learning. This may reduce linguistic barriers in accessing healthcare education. Interventions similar to ours can improve health literacy and further reduce barriers in healthcare education. Other interventions, such as preparing healthcare educational content originally in Arabic, would be helpful to further reduce barriers in healthcare education.