Bridging Understanding in Medicare: Template for Effective Communication in Indigenous Languages

One of the implications of globalization is to include all possible stakeholders in every enterprise, taking into consideration all enabling variables. The maintenance of a good patient-doctor relationship otherwise known as clinical relationship is central to the health care delivery in medical practice. For this reason, it is the usual practice in medical schools all around the globe to make the attainment of communication skills compulsory for all. A doctors good communication skill therefore is a function of a well-built medical vocabulary with which he communicates with his patients. It has been observed that medical jargons in a contemporary African society, especially Yorubaland are mostly in the English language which inadvertently breaches clinical relationships. This paper however seeks to address the issue by proposing a template for the creation of medical terms in respect of consultation procedures and directional information labels in the hospital environment in the Yoruba language as a medium of clinical communication. Appealing to concepts embedded in the theory of lexical morphology, we aim in this paper to go through word formation processes to achieve a Yoruba language template for medical terminologies.