[Managing diversity in Swiss Health care]. / Gérer la diversité en milieu clinique: compte rendu de la première Conference nationale des Migrant Friendly Hospitals.

The development of Migrant Friendly Hospitals is an important first step towards eliminating health care disparities in Switzerland and an important reminder to health policy makers and practitioners across the health care system of their responsibility to provide non-discriminatory quality health care to all patients.

[The community interpreter: a central role in the puzzle of the intercultural consultation]. / L'interprète communautaire: une pièce centrale dans le puzzle de la consultation interculturelle.

As a consequence of growing global migration, physicians in French speaking Switzerland often face communicational difficulties with allophone patients. This paper first discusses advantages and shortcomings of various ways of dealing with this kind of situations. The indication of using professional interpreters will be addressed, as well as some specific therapeutic, linguistic and relational features of triadic consultations involving a physician, a patient and an interpreter. Finally, useful practical information and advices are provided to clinicians in order to help them optimize their consultations with allophone patients.

[Action research and clinical governance: the example of the project "psychiatry and migrants" at the Vaudois University Medical Center]. / Recherche-action et gouvernance clinique: l'exemple du projet "psychiatrie et migrants" du CHUV.

Action research is a useful instrument for the organization health care and the clinical governance of psychiatric institutions. What this type of research offers can be illustrated by the cohort study of migrant patients without health insurance who consulted the Department of Psychiatry of the Vaudois university medical center (CHUV) in 2008. While giving greater visibilty to the psychological suffering and social distress of these patients, the study also enabled the authors to determine which clinical procedures were actually offered to these patients and the amount these procedures cost the department. The small number of cases that were identified as well as their uneven distribution amongst the different services of the department suggest that considerable efforts must still be made to improve access for this population to public psychiatric services.