Bridging Language Barriers in Healthcare: A Spotlight on DCMS Member Dr. Rana Alissa

Story by Lana Sumner-Borema, DCMS Intern

Dr. Rana Alissa, pediatrician at UF Health Jacksonville, remembers her own childhood pediatrician clearly.

“I wanted to be a pediatrician since I was five years old. I loved my pediatrician, I loved him so much. As a child I constantly told him ‘I want to be like you.’”

But what may surprise you is that when Dr. Alissa first moved to the United States, she didn’t even speak English. At the time, she had finished medical school in her home of Damascus, Syria, and was working as an anesthesiologist for pediatric intensive care.

“I had to do all the exams and residency over. It’s very funny as I could not afford an English course, so I just opened a medical dictionary and started reading. I remember the first half-page took me four hours to complete. I also used television by keeping the captions on. I knew the alphabet because I speak French so I learned to read and write in this way.”

Dr. Alissa’s future husband was also a physician but working in the United States as an attorney after winning a green card to the United States through the Diversity Visa Program.

“He was working in Boston when his mom was very sick with cancer. He had to come back to visit his mom in Syria and I was working as an intern at the time. We got engaged in twenty-one days. He came back to America, worked a few months, and then we got married and I came here. Never in my life did I think I would end up in the United States, I didn’t even speak English; but it was fate, I love him.”

To get her foot in the door, she took a step back and started her career in the United States as a medical assistant at UF Health Jacksonville. With dedication and a lot of hard work, she was able to eventually move into a career in research and these days she is pediatrician.

“I climbed the ladder,” she says proudly. “I live the American dream.”

This pathway to her achievements was not easy, however. After becoming an anesthesiologist in Syria, she spent one year of an internship in France, learning French while serving patients. When Dr. Alissa eventually decided to come to the United States is 2001, she was not willing to lose all the time and hard work she put into her medical career. But even with years of experience under her belt, she basically had to start from scratch with schooling, and this time in a completely new language.

Surprisingly, these days, after more than 10 years in the United States, Dr. Alissa now sometimes finds it difficult communicating medical information to her Arabic-speaking patients.

“I used to think in Arabic and translate to English, but it’s the opposite now. I don’t use medical language at home or church where I speak Arabic, that’s why it’s not easy for me. That’s why I have to think in English and translate to Arabic at work.”

While keeping Arabic in the household was originally a struggle, ironically now Dr. Alissa’s American-born kids speak even more of the language than her.

“For a little, I forbade speaking English at home so I could allow my kids to speak Arabic. I wanted them to be able to communicate with my family back home. It is always harder to speak Arabic because we are busy, my husband even more busy than I am. We don’t have time to argue with them on when they should speak Arabic or English. My kids are at an age right now where they are very interested [in Arabic], they try to only speak in Arabic, and believe it or not I answer them in English.”

Despite their busy lives, Dr. Alissa works to preserve not only the culture in her family through language, but their sense of community in a country far away from home. Separated from their Syrian family by thousands of miles, they rely completely on their nuclear family for support.

“Believe it or not, my two teenagers don’t want to do anything without me and my husband. This might seem excessive but I think it is because we don’t have family here [in the United States] so we have become very attached to each other. Very rarely would you see me going out alone, my husband going out alone, or even my kids. Everything we do together.”

Despite this separation from her home country, Dr. Alissa has never lost the need to serve that she originally learned there.

“My love for medicine overall was specifically to help people. Don’t forget, in Syria we don’t have the same resources as here. Helping people there means much more due to the excessive need. I’m not saying people here don’t need help, but in Syria 99-percent of the people need help.”

This strive for service kept her at UF Health Jacksonville as she noticed the people she was serving were members of the “low socioeconomic groups.”

Dr. Alissa recognizes her position as a doctor in the United States and not only uses it to help those she sees in the hospital, but strives to continue serving in more exploratory ways.

“I have a lot of quality improvement projects. I just finished a fellowship in medical informatics. I have boards for that in October and in the coming year for pediatric hospital medicine. I think when I’m finished with those, I’m going to find something else to do because I can’t stop.”

Her inability to sit still will possibly push her to learn Spanish in the future as she hopes to be able to communicate with more of her patients in Florida without an interpreter. She also wants to start acquiring large grants so she can work on larger research projects in hopes to “do more” for the community and world she is a part of. However, her overall love for service, her work, and especially her patients is what keeps her motivated to do all of these things.

When she is not working directly with her patients, conducting new research, or learning a different language, you’ll find her teaching residents at the hospital. As an assistant professor, Dr. Alissa has been recognized repeatedly for her excellent teaching work at UF Health. Although her residents are much older than the children she normally works with as a pediatrician, she does not see them any differently.

“My students and residents, they are exactly like my kids. This is why I love it so much, I love spending time with them in the hospital.”