ASO Author Reflections: Investigating the Relationship Between Patient Primary Language and Surgical Oncology Outcomes

Excerpt

Although language barriers between patients and their care teams are recognized as an important research priority,¹ few studies have examined this potential source of disparities in surgical care.^2,3 Patient language is rarely collected by large databases, making the New Jersey State Inpatient Database a notable exception. Our group initially used this database to study a broad set of surgical oncology operations and examined major short-term outcomes such as mortality, readmissions, and length of stay.⁴ We found no independent association between these outcomes and patient primary language. Despite these findings from a large, population-based dataset, the clinical experience of the surgical community suggests that patients who primarily speak a language other than English face unique challenges. Therefore, to deepen our understanding of how language barriers may exert an influence, we expanded our investigations to examine other aspects of surgical oncology care. …