Communication & medicine
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Communication & medicine · Jan 2013
Pain and nurses' emotion work in a paediatric clinic: treatment procedures and nurse-child alignments.
In the treatment of cancer in children, treatment procedures have been reported to be one of the most feared elements, as more painful than the illness as such. This study draws on a video ethnography of routine needle procedure events, as part of fieldwork at a paediatric oncology clinic documenting everyday treatment negotiations between nurses and young children. On the basis of detailed transcriptions of verbal and nonverbal staff-child interaction, the analyses focus on ways in which pain and anxiety can be seen as phenomena that are partly contingent on nurses' emotion work. ⋯ In the preschool group, though, pain and fear seemed to be phenomena that were greatly reduced through nurses' emotion work. This study focuses on three preschoolers facing potentially painful treatment, showing how the nurses engaged in massive emotion work with the children, through online commentaries, interactive formats (delegation of tasks, consent sequences, collaborative 'we'-formats), as well as solidarity-oriented moves (such as praise and endearment terms). Even a young toddler would handle the distress of needle procedures, when interacting with an inventive nurse who mobilized child participation through skilful emotion work.
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Communication & medicine · Jan 2013
The patient's Lifeworld: building meaningful clinical encounters between patients, physicians and interpreters.
In this paper, our objectives are first to explore the different ways physicians and interpreters interact with patients' Lifeworld, and second, to describe and compare communication patterns in consultations with professional and those with family interpreters. We conducted analyses of transcriptions of 16 family practice consultations in Montreal in the presence of interpreters. Patterns of communication are delineated, grounded in Habermas' Communicative Action Theory and Mishler's operational concepts of Voice of Medicine and Voice of Lifeworld. ⋯ A professional interpreter is likely to transmit the patient's Lifeworld utterances to the physician. A family member, on the other hand, may provide extra biomedical and Lifeworld information, but also prevent the patient's Lifeworld accounts from reaching the physician. Physicians' training should include advice on how to work with all types of interpreters and interpreters' training should include mediation competencies in order to enhance their ability to promote the processes of co-construction of meaning.