Background Clinical guidelines exhort clinicians to encourage patients to improve their health behaviours. However, most offer little support on how to have these conversations in practice. Clinicians fear that health behaviour change talk will create interactional difficulties and discomfort for both clinician and patient. This review aims to identify how healthcare professionals can best communicate with patients about health behaviour change (HBC). Methods We included studies which used conversation analysis or discourse analysis to study recorded interactions between healthcare professionals and patients. We followed an aggregative thematic synthesis approach. This involved line-by-line coding of the results and discussion sections of included studies, and the inductive development and hierarchical grouping of descriptive themes. Top-level themes were organised to reflect their conversational positioning. Results Of the 17,562 studies identified through systematic searching, ten papers were included. Analysis resulted in 10 top-level descriptive themes grouped into three domains: initiating; carrying out; and closing health behaviour change talk. Of three methods of initiation, two facilitated further discussion, and one was associated with outright resistance. Of two methods of conducting behaviour change talk, one was associated with only minimal patient responses. One way of closing was identified, and patients did not seem to respond to this positively. Results demonstrated a series of specific conversational practices which clinicians use when talking about HBC, and how patients respond to these. Our results largely complemented clinical guidelines, providing further detail on how they can best be delivered in practice. However, one recommended practice - linking a patient’s health concerns and their health behaviours - was shown to receive variable responses and to often generate resistance displays. Conclusions Health behaviour change talk is smoothly initiated, conducted, and terminated by clinicians and this rarely causes interactional difficulty. However, initiating conversations by linking a person’s current health concern with their health behaviour can lead to resistance to advice, while other strategies such as capitalising on patient initiated discussions, or collaborating through question-answer sequences, may be well received. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12875-019-0992-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Objective: Delays in seeking healthcare for dengue are associated with poor health outcomes. Despite this, the factors influencing such delays remain unclear, rendering interventions to improve healthcare seeking for dengue ineffective. This systematic review aimed to synthesise the factors influencing healthcare seeking of patients with dengue and form a comprehensive framework.Methods: This review included both qualitative and quantitative studies. Studies were obtained by searching five databases, contacting field experts and performing backward reference searches. The best-fit meta-synthesis approach was used during data synthesis, where extracted data were fitted into the social-ecological model. Sub-analyses were conducted to identify the commonly reported factors and their level of statistical significance.Results: Twenty studies were selected for meta-synthesis. Eighteen factors influencing healthcare seeking in dengue were identified and categorised under four domains: individual (11 factors), interpersonal (one factor), organisational (four factors) and community (two factors). The most reported factors were knowledge of dengue, access to healthcare, quality of health service and resource availability. Overall, more barriers to dengue health seeking than facilitators were found. History of dengue infection and having knowledge of dengue were found to be ambiguous as they both facilitated and hindered dengue healthcare seeking. Contrary to common belief, women were less likely to seek help for dengue than men. Conclusions:The factors affecting dengue healthcare-seeking behaviour are diverse, can be ambiguous and are found across multiple social-ecological levels. Understanding these complexities is essential for the development of effective interventions to improve dengue healthcare-seeking behaviour.

ObjectiveTo investigate whether the use of apatient decision aid (PDA) for insulin initiation fulfils its purpose of facilitating patient-centred decision-making through identifying how doctors and patients interact when using the PDA during primary care consultations.DesignConversation analysis of seven single cases of audio-recorded/video-recorded consultations between doctors and patients with type 2 diabetes, using a PDA on starting insulin.SettingPrimary care in three healthcare settings: (1) one private clinic; (2) two public community clinics and (3) one primary care clinic in a public university hospital, in Negeri Sembilan and the Klang Valley in Malaysia.ParticipantsClinicians and seven patients with type 2 diabetes to whom insulin had been recommended. Purposive sampling was used to select a sample high in variance across healthcare settings, participant demographics and perspectives on insulin.Primary outcome measuresInteraction between doctors and patients in a clinical consultation involving the use of a PDA about starting insulin.ResultsDoctors brought the PDA into the conversation mainly by asking information-focused ‘yes/no’ questions, and used the PDA for information exchange only if patients said they had not read it. While their contributions were limited by doctors’ questions, some patients disclosed issues or concerns. Although doctors’ PDA-related questions acted as a presequence to deliberation on starting insulin, their interactional practices raised questions on whether patients were informed and their preferences prioritised.ConclusionsInteractional practices can hinder effective PDA implementation, with habits from ordinary conversation potentially influencing doctors’ practices and complicating their implementation of patient-centred decision-making. Effective interaction should therefore be emphasised in the design and delivery of PDAs and in training clinicians to use them.

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The Candlin Researcher AwardThe low uptake of insulin leaves many Malaysians with type 2 diabetes at risk of developing complications. To improve decision making about insulin treatment, a patient decision aid (PDA) was developed for use with patients. However, although it is generally accepted that PDAs can support informed and shared decision making, there is limited discursive data showing how they are used in doctor–patient consultations. This paper reports on activity analysis of clinic consultations in which a PDA about insulin treatment was used. Eleven consultations with diverse participants conducted in three healthcare settings in Malaysia were systematically mapped to identify structural, interactional and thematic patterns. Two main phases of Assessment and Treatment were identified, with doctors generally participating more than patients. Mapping of the Treatment phase showed that structural patterns depended on two main factors: whether patients had read the PDA and whether they responded negatively or positively towards insulin. While mapping is only a preliminary stage of activity analysis, the findings offer insights into structural, interactional and thematic patterns in PDA use at the level of the whole consultation. They also point towards key areas for closer analysis of discursive practices.