Designing an e-learning application to facilitate health care professionals' cross-cultural communication

In recent times, health care professionals (HCP) have come across a number of migrants as their patients. The cultural differences lead to communicational challenges between the migrant patients and health care professionals. Our project aimed to discover HCPs' attitudes, challenges and needs on cross-cultural communication, so that we can develop an e-learning solution that would be helpful for them. By conducting interviews with HCPs, we identified five crucial categories of problems and the current solutions that experienced professionals use to tackle those problems. These interviews also helped us in understanding the motivational factors of HCPs, when using e-learning application. Health care professionals prefer a focus on examples and themes such as death and pain that they face in their everyday work. Changing attitudes by e-learning application is challenging. However, e-learning was recognized as a flexible way for supporting traditional training with HCPs who are busy at work most of the time.