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