Abstract
Background: Patient-experience results can be difficult to interpret across languages when publications do not distinguish the language of a questionnaire from the language needs of respondents or clinical encounters.
Objective: To describe what a defined, publicly accessible corpus of Saudi patient-satisfaction and patient-experience reports disclosed about patient language and interpreter support.
Methods: On 27 September 2026, a fixed, archived PubMed query selected English-language 2023–2024 records with “patient satisfaction” or “patient experience” in the title, Saudi terminology in title/abstract, and a PubMed Central full text. Original empirical reports of Saudi clinical-care experience were eligible. One extractor coded the frozen main article bodies and embedded tables; linked external supplements were not retrieved. The primary fields were defined patient-language distribution, clinical interpreter need/offer/use and patient–clinician language concordance. Instrument language, translation steps, language eligibility and nationality were coded separately. No independent second coding was done.
Results: Thirty records were retrieved; three reviews, one correction and one instrument-only validation were excluded, leaving 25 reports. Under the strict codebook, none reported a defined patient-language distribution, clinical interpreter need/offer/use or language concordance. One additional paper used an ambiguous “only Arabic participants” phrase in Discussion; counting any such narrative label gives 1/25 for patient-language information. Thirteen identified instrument language: nine Arabic only and four multilingual. Four described translation/adaptation steps, three specified language eligibility, and seven tabulated nationality. A source-overlap sensitivity left 22 publication representatives, without changing the strict primary zeros.
Conclusions: In this selected corpus, questionnaire language was often disclosed while defined respondent-language and interpreter fields were not. Publication silence cannot establish absent assistance or a patient language barrier. Separating respondent language, survey language and clinical communication would improve interpretability.
Keywords
- patient experience
- patient satisfaction
- language access
- interpreters
- Saudi Arabia
- meta-research
- reporting quality
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- Funding
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- Competing interests
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- Author contributions
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- Data availability
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- Registration
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- Acknowledgements
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