Abstract
Communication is central to the delivery of healthcare. From patients requesting an appointment, explaining what symptoms they have been experiencing and what they are concerned about, to staff asking for more information, delivering diagnoses and prognoses, and explaining different treatment options, clear understandable communication is core.
Most major investigations into failures in the UK NHS highlight communication as a key area where something has gone wrong.
Researchers endeavour to improve healthcare communication, with journals dedicated to investigations into how this can be improved (e.g. Patient Education and Counselling, Qualitative Health Communication, Health Communication). However, so much of this research entails retrospective post hoc interviews on the experience of communication, which faces issues with our ability to effectively remember what happened in a conversation to build practical advice for change.
Government recommendations for healthcare delivery rarely cite the evidence base for any communication guidelines. The focus by researchers on retrospective accounts and lack of evidence in clinical guidelines is a puzzle. Methodology is available to systematically build evidence on effective communication practices in healthcare, based on actual clinical encounters – including conversation analysis.
Conversation analysis, with its origins in sociology, uncovers the normative rules and structures that we abide by during conversations. Unlike the messy disordered talk we all think we take part in, decades of research have demonstrated that talk is structured and ordered, with rules we tend to abide by (e.g. one speaker talks at a time). This micro analytic technique has been harnessed by healthcare researchers and applied to clinical encounters as diverse as end of life care discussions5, healthy behaviour talk in primary care6 and medical emergency calls.
At the same time as being a burgeoning field, it is a puzzle why the study of actual healthcare encounters is not embraced more often throughout healthcare research, and systematically used to develop solutions to known issues in healthcare communication.
We are a group of researchers and clinicians, who have, or have attempted to, examine actual healthcare encounters. We were bought together by a need to solve this puzzle – and help improve communication in healthcare, by enabling the generation of the gold standard of evidence through the recording and analysis of actual healthcare encounters.
Preliminary findings from our survey of UK researchers with experience of recording or attempting to record healthcare encounters for research speak to the causes of this puzzle. Content analysis was applied to responses from 24 participants, recruited between April – May 2024.
Most major investigations into failures in the UK NHS highlight communication as a key area where something has gone wrong.
Researchers endeavour to improve healthcare communication, with journals dedicated to investigations into how this can be improved (e.g. Patient Education and Counselling, Qualitative Health Communication, Health Communication). However, so much of this research entails retrospective post hoc interviews on the experience of communication, which faces issues with our ability to effectively remember what happened in a conversation to build practical advice for change.
Government recommendations for healthcare delivery rarely cite the evidence base for any communication guidelines. The focus by researchers on retrospective accounts and lack of evidence in clinical guidelines is a puzzle. Methodology is available to systematically build evidence on effective communication practices in healthcare, based on actual clinical encounters – including conversation analysis.
Conversation analysis, with its origins in sociology, uncovers the normative rules and structures that we abide by during conversations. Unlike the messy disordered talk we all think we take part in, decades of research have demonstrated that talk is structured and ordered, with rules we tend to abide by (e.g. one speaker talks at a time). This micro analytic technique has been harnessed by healthcare researchers and applied to clinical encounters as diverse as end of life care discussions5, healthy behaviour talk in primary care6 and medical emergency calls.
At the same time as being a burgeoning field, it is a puzzle why the study of actual healthcare encounters is not embraced more often throughout healthcare research, and systematically used to develop solutions to known issues in healthcare communication.
We are a group of researchers and clinicians, who have, or have attempted to, examine actual healthcare encounters. We were bought together by a need to solve this puzzle – and help improve communication in healthcare, by enabling the generation of the gold standard of evidence through the recording and analysis of actual healthcare encounters.
Preliminary findings from our survey of UK researchers with experience of recording or attempting to record healthcare encounters for research speak to the causes of this puzzle. Content analysis was applied to responses from 24 participants, recruited between April – May 2024.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Media of output | Psychological Sciences Research Group blog |
| Publication status | Published - 2 Jul 2024 |