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Improving health outcomes for linguistically diverse patients

Christine B Phillips
Med J Aust 2016; 204 (6): . || doi: 10.5694/mja16.00009
Published online: 4 April 2016

Cardiovascular health for all in Australia requires language-sensitive health systems

Every day, most Australian clinicians treat patients whose first language is not English. Nearly four million Australians speak 350 non-English languages, and 17% rate their spoken English as poor.1 To date, there has been little large scale Australian research into the health impacts of not speaking the country’s dominant language.


  • Australian National University, Canberra, ACT



Competing interests:

No relevant disclosures.

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