Communicating With Care

This 2006 volume provides a comprehensive discussion of communication between doctors and patients in primary care consultations. It brings together a team of leading contributors from the fields of linguistics, sociology and medicine to describe each phase of the primary care consultation, identifying the distinctive tasks, goals and activities that make up each phase of primary care as social interaction. Using conversation analysis techniques, the authors analyze the sequential unfolding of a visit, and describe the dilemmas and conflicts faced by physicians and patients as they work through each of these activities. The result is a view of the medical encounter that takes the perspective of both physicians and patients in a way that is both rigorous and humane. Clear and comprehensive, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, communication studies, sociology, and medicine.

At the start of studies on health communication, scholars were primarily concerned with showing the ethical implications of a new approach to care and with collecting evidence to demonstrate its greater effectiveness as opposed to the paternalistic and mechanistic paradigms. Well into the second decade of the 21st century, different issues need to be addressed. Aging populations and the spread of chronic diseases are challenging the sustainability of health care systems worldwide; increased awareness of health issues among the population and greater citizen participation seem to threaten clinicians’ authority. In this new scenario, it is acknowledged that the quality of verbal communication plays a crucial role, but it is still not clear how it impacts on the outcomes of care, which are its constitutive components and how it interacts with the institutional, cultural and social context of interactions. This book suggests that the time is ripe for a fresh start in health communication studies. As Debra Roter points out in her foreword, this proposal “is ambitious in attempting to integrate perspectives derived from pragmatics and argumentation theory with those derived from quantitative methods of medical interaction analysis and its prediction of outcomes”. On the other hand, as Giovanni Gobber explains in his foreword, “health communication can profit from an application of a performance-oriented linguistic analysis that pays attention to the role of the various relevant context factors in speech events related to specific activity types”. In this way, the open questions regarding communication in medical encounters are considered under a new light. The answers provided open up novel lines of research and provide an original perspective to face the new challenges in medical care.

For patients and their loved ones, no care decisions are more profound than those made near the end of life. Unfortunately, the experience of dying in the United States is often characterized by fragmented care, inadequate treatment of distressing symptoms, frequent transitions among care settings, and enormous care responsibilities for families. According to this report, the current health care system of rendering more intensive services than are necessary and desired by patients, and the lack of coordination among programs increases risks to patients and creates avoidable burdens on them and their families. Dying in America is a study of the current state of health care for persons of all ages who are nearing the end of life. Death is not a strictly medical event. Ideally, health care for those nearing the end of life harmonizes with social, psychological, and spiritual support. All people with advanced illnesses who may be approaching the end of life are entitled to access to high-quality, compassionate, evidence-based care, consistent with their wishes. Dying in America evaluates strategies to integrate care into a person- and family-centered, team-based framework, and makes recommendations to create a system that coordinates care and supports and respects the choices of patients and their families. The findings and recommendations of this report will address the needs of patients and their families and assist policy makers, clinicians and their educational and credentialing bodies, leaders of health care delivery and financing organizations, researchers, public and private funders, religious and community leaders, advocates of better care, journalists, and the public to provide the best care possible for people nearing the end of life.

Written by prominent and internationally renowned scholars, Communicating Quality and Safety in Healthcare engages healthcare trainees from across medicine, nursing and allied health services in a comprehensive and probing discussion of the communication demands that confront today's healthcare teams.

This book aims to increase awareness about the importance of communication in health care. Written by healthcare professionals and Communication experts, it is replete with real-life scenarios that readers can identify with, and will serve as a guide to effective and efficient communication that affects the most important stakeholders in health care – The patient.

"Relational Care focuses on how people working in and around healthcare can improve the delivery of whole person care. This text integrates Systems Theory and a range of communication tools to support readers in working collaboratively and developing individualized road maps for difficult conversations. This practice-changing textbook will be useful to a range of health practitioners, including nurses, Physician Assistants, physicians, and more. It can be used as a supplemental reading for medical interviewing and communications courses"--

Communication is an essential skill for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals when delivering care to patients and their families. With its unique and practical approach, this new textbook will support students throughout the three years of their degree programme and on into practice, focussing on how to develop person-centredness and compassionate and collaborative care. Key features include: * students' experiences and stories from service users and patients to help readers relate theory to practice * reflective exercises to help students think critically about their communication skills * learning objectives and chapter summaries for revision * interactive activities directly linked to the Values Exchange Community website