Language barriers

During my International placement I was faced with not just one patient who had no idea what I was saying but nearly all my patients having no clue. There were at least 8 different languages spoken with only 5 or so patients being able to speak fairly good English. This was difficult for the one on ones and extremely difficult for the first week of group classes. To overcome this I started picking up some words from the phrase book I had bought and listening to the carers and trying to see the reaction of the patients for certain words. In the one on ones I actually tended to be silent using demonstration and guidance along with a few key words like relax, pain?, roll, sit up/stand up, up/down, left/right, keep going and of course thank you. By just learning these few words in the primary language spoken the compliance level rose immensely. During group class exercises were grouped together so that when repeated, the patients would pick up that they were doing something they had done before. I made use of those who could speak English, either learning words or getting them to explain exercises. By the end of the second week there were fewer patients doing completely different things and by then they trusted me enough to just let me do my treatments and pick up what I wanted through guidance. I just had to trust my own manual handling and demonstration skills and think of at least 5 different ways to explain or demonstrate a task... simple as that.