Third International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Healthcare and wellness tourism has existed in the Canary Islands for a long time. According to Nicolás González Lemus (2007), the latter part of the XX century saw an increase in the number of foreign patients who used to visit Tenerife and Gran Canaria to relief their rheumatic, skin-related and respiratory diseases. Those were the years when the healthy qualities of sea water and breeze were widely recommended as a therapy. Nowadays, health tourism also includes visitors who come to the Islands due to its weather and social security system. Apart from those, there are certain foreigners who need to make use of health services during their holidays or short stays of any kind (Carmen Toledano Buendía, 2006). The lack of an interpreting service to assist foreigners, who are in the country, makes it difficult for staff to communicate with patients and overcome linguistic and cultural barriers. In the light of previous studies, we have researched some of the possible solutions that the public hospitals on the island of Gran Canaria have come up with. We have noticed that at the public hospitals a volunteer interpreter is in charge of not only translating but also helping the patients’ family with their accommodation, plane tickets and some other tasks. We have also interviewed health and administrative professionals to know how they communicate with foreign patients. Our results and conclusions regarding the current situation of public health service will be presented in this conference.