Communication and Professional Relationships in Healthcare Practice

Communication and Professional Relationships in Healthcare Practice focuses on the crucial role that spoken interactions play in shaping relationships in contemporary healthcare practice. The authors apply theoretical concepts of communication to the workplace of healthcare, drawing upon scenarios based in the settings of clinical experience. The book presents a wide range of interactions (including consultations, team meetings, dialogues and casual conversations) between health professionals, their colleagues and their clients or patients in a variety of settings. Drawing on the latest research in applied linguistics and professional communication, the authors introduce readers to a number of approaches that can be used to analyse these interactions. Using these techniques, readers will discover exactly how central themes of healthcare practice (including trust, empathy, expertise and breaking bad news) are constructed through the communicative choices that participants make in these interactions.Designed specifically for medical, nursing and allied health practitioners with an interest in communication, the book makes the techniques of discourse analysis accessible and provides ample opportunities for individual practitioners to apply this knowledge to their own professional contexts.

'Refreshingly, the book addresses communication not only in interactions between health professionals and patients, but amongst team members and between health professionals in an array of communicatively challenging real world contexts. It brings home to the reader the complexity of communication in health care, and it offers practitioners many tools for reflecting on their own and others' communicative practices, and for enhancing their professional interactions.' Dr Catherine O'Grady, Educator and Applied Linguist -Health Communication

Sally Candlin is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University and the author of Therapeutic Communication: A Lifespan Approach (Pearson Education, 2008). She is a Registered Nurse, Registered Midwife and a Health Visitor. Peter Roger is a Lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University. He studied Medicine at the University of Sydney and worked as a medical practitioner for several years before going on to complete a PhD in communication sciences and disorders.