How do nurses describe health care procedures? Analysing nurse-patient interaction in a hospital ward

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Abstract

Objective
Nurses’ communication skills have a significant
impact on their professional effectiveness. This study
examines the communication strategies used by
nurses on the ward in one aspect of the job, namely
the ways that they describe health procedures to
patients.

Design and setting
The data used in this project was collected by nurses
on a busy hospital ward as part of Victoria University’s
Language in the Workplace Project. Three nurses
carried minidisc recorders as they went about their
normal working day, recording their conversations with
patients, visitors, and other staff. Relevant sections
of this talk (totalling 300 minutes) were transcribed
and analysed using a discourse analysis approach,
thus providing a sound basis for analysing the
communicative act of describing a health procedure
and for identifying a range of relevant sociolinguistic
components of the interaction.

Subjects
The data was collected in a women’s hospital ward.
All patients, nurses, cleaners and ward clerks were
female; two doctors were female and two were male.

Results
Twenty three instances where nurses described
procedures to patients were identified in the data set.
The analysis identified several typical components;
indicated there was no fixed order of components; and
demonstrated that all except the core component of
describing the procedure were optional rather than
obligatory elements.

Conclusions
This is qualitative and exploratory research. Our
findings demonstrate the benefit of discourse analysis
within a sociolinguistic framework for the analysis
of nurse‑patient interaction. The results indicate
that health discourse is not one‑sided, nor is it as
straightforward as many nursing textbooks suggest.

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