The author describes and analyzes the dilemma and problems posed by the nurse-immigrant patient relationship in the framework of hospitalization according to an ethnographic study carried out in the San Carlos Clinical Hospital in Madrid between January and July 2003. The growing presence of immigrants in our country is a source of misunderstandings and problems, susceptible of having continuity regarding hospitalization. (Moreno Preciado 2003). Illness and hospitalization constitute transcendental moments marked by a person's physical and psychic fragility and by the presence of a distinct environment which obliges a patient to make an important effort to adapt. In the case of immigrants, one can foresee that a confrontation among the distinct cultural forms to understand the health-sickness-treatment process and the social conditions due to migration create certain disagreements in patient-nurse dialogue which are convenient to investigate. To analyze the principal factors which intervene in this interrelationship is the main objective of this study. The analysis of empirical data obtained from field work sheds some light on the problem under consideration, confirming, to a degree, the initial hypothesis that impersonal practices inherent in biomedicine interfere and make difficult the nurse-immigrant patient relationship impeding a holistic focus on treatment which is particularly necessary when dealing with patients coming from other cultures.

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anthropology health service Emigration and Immigration language health services Article human Humans migration