Practical research to build better communication between medical professionals and the public: focusing on the documents used at hospitals

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 22520530
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Japanese language education
• Research Institution: Osaka University
• Principal Investigator: OTANI Shinya 大阪大学, 国際教育交流センター, 准教授 (50294137)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): SMITH Tomoko 大阪薬科大学, 薬学部, 准教授 (50402988) ; UZUHASHI Yoshiko 大阪大学, 国際教育交流センター, 非常勤講師 (40402987)
• Project Period (FY): 2010-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: やさしい日本語 / ユニバーサル日本語 / 病院文書 / 問診票 / 異文化理解 / 異文化コミュニケーション

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In order to be of some help to build better communication between medical professionals and the public, we focused on improving the documents used at hospitals. For that purpose, the documents should be not only written in simple language, but also well-designed in many ways such as the contents, logical structure and the documents' layouts. We also had to be very careful about patients' culture, background, and privacy.
A public hospital has adopted the documents we made. We continued our research to see if the documents were useful or not, especially with "Monshinhyo" (medical admittance forms), and we have improved them for better communication.

Free Research Field

日本語教育学・言語社会学・言語政策