Communicating effectively with inclusion health populations: 2022 ICCH symposium

Objective: To describe communication strategies for clinical practice that allow practitioners to work more effectively with marginalised population groups and to discuss how to incorporate these into medical practice.Methods: Active practitioners working in inclusion health and people with lived experience of homelessness and the asylum-seeking process shared their perspectives in the symposium at the 2022 International Conference on Communication in Healthcare (ICCH) and a subsequent conference on empathy in healthcare. The views of attendees were sought.Symposium Discussion: We describe the perspectives shared at the symposia under two main themes: communication needs in people experiencing homelessness and migrant populations, and trauma-informed practice.Conclusions: People experiencing homelessness have more communication challenges compared to the general adult population. Migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking populations also face the complexity of negotiating unfamiliar healthcare, legal and social systems with the added burden of language barriers. Trauma-informed practice provides a useful framework that can improve communication with these groups.