LIKAR Card
What is the LIKAR card?
LIKAR is an acronym and stands for "Easy-to-use, intuitive and free medical history aid in emergency services", and was developed under the impression of refugees without language skills who end up as patients in emergency care. On the one hand, there are private initiatives that bring refugees to the border (often without a doctor's note), who then often have to be taken over and cared for by the rescue service without a precise picture of their symptoms. In the meantime, however, there are so many refugees in eastern Brandenburg that they quite naturally also have to be cared for in emergencies by the rescue service or the emergency rooms. This showed that the language lists with Cyrillic phonetic transcription often cannot be used well by the investigators. This may work in language courses, but even these cannot be implemented with the necessary level for all. Telephone translators have also not been effective, in part due to poor accessibility. Online translator tools were also impractical, partly because the answer could often not be translated into German without a Cyrillic keyboard. Anamnesis apps with sound recognition often did not function reliably.
This is where the LIKAR card comes in. It cannot break the language barrier, it simply bypasses it. It accepts that direct communication with the patient cannot always be realized in an emergency. Instead, pictograms and native language are used, with previously translated questions according to SAMPLER scheme as a common emergency history tool. Patients point to the answer, and the examiner can capture it and point to the next question - direct verbal communication is thus dispensable for gross emergency history taking. However, this does not replace the necessary educational interview and fine diagnosis with a physician in the native language, but it helps to recognize and treat emergencies. It was developed in cooperation with the Naemi-Wilke Stift in Guben, and is available in several languages. The LIKAR Card and the related LIKAR APP were funded by the German Foundation for Commitment and Volunteering.



