Sarah J White

UNSW Sydney | UNSW

Objective In this article we present a conceptual framework for enhancing effective healthcare communication in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Methods Through an iterative, deliberative dialogue approach, we, as experts from a variety of health professions and academic disciplines, worked together to identify core values and considerations fo...

Linguists and conversation analysts provide insight into how effective communication is achieved through diverse interactional practices in clinical settings. The expertise we bring to describing and interpreting communication in practice allows for a more granular examination, revealing practices that constitute clinical work in situ. This work al...

The expansion of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic can be further adapted and extended to align with principles of climate justice. We argue that high-emission countries with well-developed medical systems, like Australia, should support communities disproportionately impacted by climate change who request assistance, like in small island sta...

Background: The referral letter serves a central role in the transfer of patients from referring doctors to specialist care in Australia. Aim: We analysed the form and function of referral letters and examined their role in surgical consultations to better understand the information in the letter and what impact that may or may not have on consulta...

Background: Small talk and social talk are often recommended to doctors as rapport building strategies for consultations. These types of talk occur across different activities in clinical consultations. Aim: To explore how small talk and social talk are used in surgical consultations. Methods: Using conversation analysis, we examined the sequential...

Objective Patient-centredness is central to providing safe care and is achieved, in part, through involving patients in developing the agenda of the consultation. Medical consultations have changed significantly over the last two years as a result of COVID-19 and thus understanding how patients contribute to the clinical and interactional agendas w...

Background Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, use of telehealth has expanded rapidly. However, little is known about the impact of delivering care through telehealth on communication between clinicians and patients. At an interactional level, the ways in which clinicians establish rapport and connection with their patients in telehealth consultations is...

Communication in clinical practice has been the focus of linguistic, psychological, and sociological research for half a century, yet there is still so little emphasis on using that research to improve communication in practice. In this article, we urge for a repositioning of communication as a clinical skill, along with a stronger reliance on comm...

How diagnosis fits within the overall activity structure of surgical consultations remains under-researched. We set out to contribute to this developing area of research with a particular focus on responses to diagnosis as an achievement of patient agency. We identified 26 diagnostic sequences in a collection of 35 video recorded surgical consultat...

The clinical work of GPs and physiotherapists frequently involves the assessment of patient pain. In this study, we aimed to determine the correlation of patient- and clinician-assessment of severity of pain through quantitative analysis of patient- and clinician-assessed pain scores collected at metropolitan general practice and physiotherapy clin...

Objective It can be difficult to identify specific skills to improve communication, particularly if feedback is generalised or vague. With the aim of providing specific feedback for improved doctor-patient communication, we piloted a modified Conversation Analytic Roleplay Method (CARM) for one-to-one training. Methods We recorded one surgical reg...

Objective: Communication in healthcare has influenced and been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this position paper, we share observations based on the latest available evidence and experiential knowledge that have emerged during the pandemic, with a specific focus on policy and practice. Methods: This is a position paper that presents ob...

Background: The tension between the ideal of informed consent and the reality of the process is under-investigated in spine surgery. Guidelines around consent imply a logical, plain-speaking process with a clear endpoint, agreement and signature yet surgeons' surveys and patient interviews suggest that surgeons' explanation is anecdotally variable...

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Communication skills are considered a central part of medical and health professional curricula. The focus for both theoretical knowledge and practical skills in these curricula is often, necessarily, on that which is directly relevant to consultations and other clinical activities....

Objective The objective of this study is to characterize the dynamic structure of primary care consultations by identifying typical activities and their inter-relationships to inform the design of automated approaches to clinical documentation using natural language processing and summarization methods. Materials and Methods This is an observation...

Communication skills are considered a central part of medical and health professional curricula. The focus for both theoretical knowledge and practical skills in these curricula is often, necessarily, on that which is directly relevant to consultations and other clinical activities. Prior to engaging in this more specific and often experiential lea...

This volume brings together a range of linguistic, sociological, and professional views on communication in surgical practice. It aims to provide an insight into the complexity of communication in surgery, covering the variety of communicative activities required in everyday surgical work. The selection of authors from a variety of interactive soc...

Simulation training is a widely used educational modality for both technical and non-technical skills (Ziv, Wolpe et al. 2003, Meyer, Sellers et al. 2009, University of Technology 2012) and provides a safe environment for trainees to practice these skills (Kneebone, Nestel et al. 2006). However, research into simulation training for communication i...

Closing clinical consultations has not been the subject of much analytical attention, particularly in comparison to other phases of the medical consultation. While there has been less research in this area, much of which that has been done uses the sociological methodology of Conversation Analysis, ensuring a detailed, turn-by-turn understanding of...

Background: There is an assumption that there is a similarity between surgeon-patient and primary care consultations. Yet, surgeon communication has had far less analytic attention than its primary care counterparts. Therefore, this assumption of similarity (and the proposition here of dissimilarity) has yet to be evidenced through detailed intera...

This study describes and analyzes the impact of the referral process on communication at the beginning of surgeon-patient consultations. We used conversation analysis to analyze the opening interactional activities of surgeon-patient consultations in New Zealand. This study focuses on 20 video-recorded consultations recorded between 2004 and 2006....

Closing an encounter is a co-constructed activity through which participants conclude verbal and non-verbal action in a way that allows each to raise any matters they wish prior to the termination of the encounter (West, 2006). Although medical encounters are often time restricted, the scheduled length of the appointment “does not determine just wh...

There is a fine balance that needs to be maintained between research and improvement in safety and quality in health care - when do we need more research and when can we just get on with it? The moral imperative to improve care may have been a distractor, preventing adequate attention to research. Three research areas are proposed as current priori...