Browsing by Author "Claassen, Joel"

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    An analysis of the Afrikaans telephonic descriptors of cardiac arrest in a Western Cape Emergency Control centre
    (2020) van Rensburg, Louis Chris; Stassen, Willem; Claassen, Joel
    Introduction: Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) is a time-sensitive emergency which requires prompt identification and emergency care in order to reduce morbidity and mortality. The first step in recognising OHCA is rapid identification by the emergency dispatch centre. Identification of such patients remains challenging in South Africa due to multiple languages and widely differing levels of education. This study aimed to identify the key descriptors (words and phrases) of OHCA used by callers speaking Afrikaans when contacting the emergency dispatch centre of the Western Cape Provincial Emergency Medical Services (WC-EMS). Methodology: Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data with a corresponding “patient unresponsive” incident type were drawn for a 12 month period (January – December 2018). Corresponding patient care records were extracted to verify OHCA. The original voice recordings between the caller and emergency call taker at the time of the emergency were extracted and transcribed verbatim. Transcriptions were subjected to inductive, qualitative content analysis to the manifest level. Descriptors of OHCA in Afrikaans calls were coded, categorised and quantified. Results: A total of 729 confirmed OHCA cases were identified, of which 36 (5%) were in Afrikaans and eligible for analysis. Following content analysis, 83 distinct codes in six categories were identified. The most prevalent categories were descriptors related to Respiratory Effort (apnoea and difficulty in breathing; 30.1%) (30.1%), Clinical Features (related to the eyes, mouth and body temperature; 20.4%) and Cardiac Activity (pulselessness; 16.8%). Conclusion Afrikaans Callers within the Western Cape province of South Africa use consistent descriptors when requesting and ambulance for OHCA. Future studies should focus on describing descriptors for other languages commonly spoken in the province, and to develop and validate telephonic OHCA recognition algorithms.
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    Building freeways: piloting communication skills in additional languages to health service personnel in Cape Town, South Africa
    (BioMed Central, 2017-06-07) Claassen, Joel; Jama, Zukile; Manga, Nayna; Lewis, Minnie; Hellenberg, Derek
    Background: This study reflects on the development and teaching of communication skills courses in additional national languages to health care staff within two primary health care facilities in Cape Town, South Africa. These courses were aimed at addressing the language disparities that recent research has identified globally between patients and health care staff. Communication skills courses were offered to staff at two Metropolitan District Health Services clinics to strengthen patient access to health care services. This study reflects on the communicative proficiency in the additional languages that were offered to health care staff. Methods: A mixed-method approach was utilised during this case study with quantitative data-gathering through surveys and qualitative analysis of assessment results. The language profiles of the respective communities were assessed through data obtained from the South African National census, while staff language profiles were obtained at the health care centres. Quantitative measuring, by means of a patient survey at the centres, occurred on a randomly chosen day to ascertain the language profile of the patient population. Participating staff performed assessments at different phases of the training courses to determine their skill levels by the end of the course. Results: The performances of the participating staff during the Xhosa and Afrikaans language courses were assessed, and the development of the staff communicative competencies was measured. Health care staff learning the additional languages could develop Basic or Intermediate Xhosa and Afrikaans that enables communication with patients. Conclusions: In multilingual countries such as South Africa, language has been recognised as a health care barrier preventing patients from receiving quality care. Equipping health care staff with communication skills in the additional languages, represents an attempt to bridge a vital barrier in the South African health care system. The study proves that offering communication skills courses in additional languages, begins to equip health care staff to be multilingual, that allows patients to communicate about their illnesses within their mother tongues.
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    The role of a spatial-temporal deictic paradigm in literary analysis : an evaluation of Karel Schoeman's triptych "Stemme” ['Voices']
    (2005) Claassen, Joel; Snyman, Henning
    Deixis has had a useful, yet fairly one-dimensional history in Linguistics. The core of traditional deixis is essentially the manner that the utterance reflects the spatial and temporal position of the narrator. The aim of this study has been to pursue a paradigmatic application of deixis to literature, much as Snyman (1983), Anker (1987) and Fludernik (1997) have utilised deixis as a stylistic tool in the analysis of poetry, short stories and shorter novels. What this dissertation proposes is that deixis could also be a viewed as a literary paradigm in the analysis of literary texts. The deictic paradigm can also be especially important, as a narrative structural principle, in the evaluation of literary texts where space and time causes particular difficulty. In order to develop deixis as a paradigm, a spatial and temporal deictic analysis, is emphasized.