In the provision of care to older clients, home support workers regularly confront, avert, and manage crises. Semistructured interviews were conducted to explore the nature, type, and management of crises from the perspective of home support workers (N = 118) of older persons in British Columbia, Canada. The delivery of home health care occurs within a context of unpredictability related to scheduling, time constraints, variability of client need, and changing work environments. These events are experienced by 91% of home support workers and range from a serious medical incident (e.g., fall, death) to an interpersonal dilemma (e.g., client refusal of service, argument between worker and family member). Home support workers use a variety of strategies to manage these incidents. The analysis of crises enables us to better understand how agency and care policies may be more responsive to circumstances that challenge care work in home health settings.

This article explores the functions of personal celebrity health narratives in the public sphere. This study examines data about 157 celebrities, including athletes, actors, musicians, and politicians, who have shared private information regarding a personal health situation (or that of a loved one) with others in the public domain. Part of a larger project on celebrity health narratives, this article highlights three key functions that celebrity health narratives perform--education, inspiration, and activism--and discusses the implications for celebrities and for public conversations about health-related issues.

Based on an analysis of articles in health communication journals and in regional, national, and international communication journals, this study identifies publication trends and research priorities for health communication articles in the 1990s and the year 2000. Based on a content analysis of article abstracts, researchers determined the extent to which health communication articles appeared in various journals as well as the emphasis on specific topics in health communication research, methodological approaches, and theoretical frameworks. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this study for future work in the area of health communication.

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This article explores how patients engage in problematic disclosures to their physician. Dialogue from medical encounters suggests that patients sometimes use exaggerated self-disparagement to bid for a physician's forgiveness and reassurance. Grounded in work on conversational framing and alignment, this study documents the conversational mechanism of overclaiming. Overclaims function like disclaimers or accounts, but rather than disclaiming responsibility for an action with potentially negative consequences, the speaker seems to claim disproportionate responsibility for it. In the conversations studied, such bids pay off with emphatic compliments and reassurance. Overclaiming facilitates a shift from the primary frame of a medical encounter to a secondary frame that focuses on the nature of the overclaim rather than the nature of the violation. It is suggested that overclaims are used to elicit more-than-usual reassurance, to save face, and to preserve conversational alignment.