Enhancing the Language Environment Within Healthcare: The Case of Healthy China Initiative

Abstract

The Healthy China initiative gives priority to the development of people’s health and integrates health into all health. It urgently necessitates the enhancement of language capabilities within the medical domain of the public health service system. The linguistic landscape in the medical field reflects the multifaceted interactions among its participants. This paper, grounded in a framework of place semiotics and supplemented by surveys of both physical and virtual linguistic landscapes of 6 hospitals along with 60 valid questionnaires, examines the current state of the linguistic landscape in Hefei’s medical field and endeavors to define it. This study investigates the evident language usage of hospitals. It shows the role of language in medical contexts and how it reflects public service goals, internationalization, and accessibility issues. This study comes at a time when the focus on health communication is growing and the need for hospital signs to be multilingual is critical. It makes the important contribution of explaining how public policy objectives and patient experiences in healthcare services can be achieved through the management of linguistic landscapes. However, the study identifies several issues, including a lack of language signs targeting specific populations and a low prevalence of language intelligent devices, which provide insights for the scientific, digital, and standardized management of the linguistic landscape in the medical field and if necessary, medical artificial intelligence devices are provided.