Understanding the Shared Wisdom in Doctor-Patient Communication
Proposed Workshop, 18th June 2003, Canberra
General Practice and Primary Health Care ConferenceOrganised by:
Barry McGrath (Department of Rural Health, The University of Melbourne, Shepparton)
Jill Freiberg (Faculty of Education, Griffith University, Brisbane)
Ruth McNair (Department of General Practice, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne)
Chris Hogan (The Victorian Research Unit, The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners)
ABSTRACTWithin the medical consultation, communication is fundamental to prevention, diagnosis and management. A substantial literature exists on the many approaches to the analysis of talk between doctors and patients; and many undergraduate and postgraduate medical curricula place particular emphasis on the interactions within the medical consultation.
This workshop will explore the findings of a three-year Australian Research Council funded study that examined the talk in medical consultations. GP-patient interactions in urban and rural settings were audio-taped, transcribed and analysed. Participating GPs reviewed transcripts and analyses with investigators and generated typologies that may be used in medical education.
The innovative contribution of this study has been the use of Conversation Analysis to understand the talk within medical consultations.
This workshop has several learning objectives. Participants will receive a potted version of the underpinning theoretical concerns of Conversation Analysis, however the focus will be the examination and understanding of the typologies produced by this study in small groups and in fine detail. The session will conclude with a discussion of the appropriateness of such typologies for undergraduate and postgraduate medical education.
The typologies reveal the wisdom embodied in the private world of GP-patient talk. The tightly choreographed interactions are often influenced by mutually produced events rather than any biomedical or consumer pre-theorising. The talk and the actions are situated in the context of the particular occasion, are locally produced in response to triggers, develop incrementally yet are unpredictable and transformable at any moment.
Those engaged in such talk will recognize its characteristics and understand the difficulty in conveying its nuances of shared wisdom to succeeding generations.