This article analyses the public testimony of four banking CEOs to the Banking Crisis Inquiry of the Treasury Committee of the UK House of Commons in 2009. Utilizing a discursive and interpretive approach, we explore how they attributed responsibility and blame for the crisis through the medium of public apologies. A number of taxonomies of apology are employed to provide an interpretive framework for the analysis. We conclude that the CEO discourse is characterized by expressions of regret, attempts to articulate alignment with others affected by the crisis and dissociation from the events being scrutinized, in order to avoid direct culpability for the crisis and invoke instead the spectre of impersonal global events which mitigates personal responsibility. We therefore characterize the discourse studied as an example of apology avoidance, and consider the constraints on apology which senior CEOs evidently feel they face.

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The growth of the “patient‐centred” approach to health care has highlighted the importance of quality communication practices. One area that remains problematic, however, is the process of breaking bad news to patients and/or relatives. Hence, there have been calls for more research and training in this domain. Reports the findings of a study that used the critical incident technique to explore the breaking bad news encounter from the perspective of the health care practitioner. In total 33 senior medical and nursing staff reported on situations in which they described specific, vividly recalled, experiences of both “effective” and “ineffective” bad news delivery. These reported incidents were content analysed and a range of key dimensions was identified for both effective and ineffective experiences. Interpersonal communication skills emerged as particularly salient factors and these are discussed in detail, together with implications for future research and training.

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