Connecting with Arab/Middle Eastern Patients in Canadian Healthcare: Empathic Intercultural Communication

Empathic communication is known to play a pivotal role in healthcare, by building trust and ensuring patients feel respected. Yet, increases in global migration have added novel intercultural complexity to interactions within a variety of domestic work contexts, including healthcare. Despite this trend, the question of how Western-trained healthcare providers navigate intercultural communication challenges in clinical encounters remains under explored. Considering Canada's growing Middle Eastern immigrant population, this study sought to investigate how Ontario healthcare providers have conceptualized, enacted, and evaluated empathic communication with Middle Eastern newcomer patients. Using a qualitative methodology, we conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with healthcare providers. Our results revealed three interrelated conceptual themes: attentive perspective-taking, conveying active listening, and accommodating/empowering patients. These findings advance existing scholarship on empathic healthcare communication by underscoring how healthcare providers balance professional boundaries with cultural accommodation. On a practical level, this study also offers guidance for intercultural communication training: it identifies practical behavioural strategies that foreground relational attunement and behavioural flexibility, which can equip providers to navigate complex, diverse care encounters with confidence and efficacy.