“Emergency medicine is largely a communicative activity, and medical mishaps that occur in this context are too often the result of vulnerable communication processes.”(Eisenberg et al. 2005, 390)

International migration is at an all-time high. The number of international migrants residing in Belgium soared from a bit over 850 thousand in 2000 to almost 1.4 million in 2015 (World Bank 2016). Over the same period, the number of global migrants grew from 172 million to 243 million. A major implication of these expanding migration patterns is the increasing diversity observed in hospitals in metropolitan areas around the world. Patients of foreign descent are often overrepresented in hospital-based care, which means that hospital staff around the world are increasingly confronted with the challenge of communicating with patients with whom they do not share a common language. While this generates particular challenges for quality of and access to care in hospitals (Scheeres et al. 2008), most of the existing research on clinical communication has focused on primary care rather than secondary, hospital-based care.