Communication about patients during ward rounds and verbal handovers: A gender perspective

Abstract

This article investigates gender patterns on how two interprofessional teams communicate about patients in their absence. Thirteen ward rounds and 17 verbal handovers were audio-recorded and analyzed through a qualitative content analysis. The ward rounds consisted of 1 physician and 2-4 nurses. The verbal handovers consisted of 2-3 nurses and as many assistant nurses. The data were collected at a cardiac clinic at a hospital in southern Sweden. The results indicate that when patients acted according to socially-accepted gender norms, the communication among the interprofessional teams was characterized as 'professional', including communication primarily about the medical situation of the patient and statements of a non-judgmental nature. When patients did not act according to socially-accepted gender norms, the communication among the interprofessional teams switched to become more 'informal', including non-medical oriented statements of a negative nature. When the healthcare workers take the patient's psycho-social condition into account, as advocated by concepts like 'holistic care' and 'patient-centered care', the risk for speculation and arbitrariness may increase, especially within interprofessional teams who hold a nursing responsibility for patients. Establishing more defined guidelines of how non-medical aspects should be dealt with are thus of importance to the development of an equitable provision and delivery of healthcare.

The Problematics of Gender for Aviation Emergency Communication during an Inflight Emergency: A Case Study

“…These recommendations are not only relevant to people who define themselves as nonbinary but reflect more general cultural shifts about how people think about and express their gender identities (see also Klein 2011). Hedegaard (2019) studied medical personnel interacting with patients and found that when patients did not follow stereotypically gendered norms, the staff interacted differently with them (more informally, less "professionally"). Hildenbrand, Perrault, and Rnoh (2022) found that female patients were more likely to feel they were treated dismissively by healthcare providers than male patients.…”

Subordinated masculinities: A critical inquiry into reproduction of gender norms in handovers and rounds in a forensic psychiatric care

“…In psychiatric practice in particular, such handovers and rounds are central in producing knowledge about patients, whose mental states are assessed during observations of their behaviour, activities and speech, all of which depend upon context (Buus, 2006; Eivergård, Enmarker, Livholts, Aléx, & Hellzén, 2018; Scovell, 2010). In verbal handovers and ward rounds, language plays an important role as a tool for conveying information (Hedegaard, 2019; Salzmann‐Eriksson, 2018). However, in those contexts, language should not be conceived as a simple way of objectively transferring information but as a convention of social groups.…”

“…By extension, knowledge should be understood as the effect of power constituted in language (Crowe, 1998; Foucault, 1994). In language as such, gender operates as an overall categorising principle (Hedegaard, 2019; Kumpula, Gustavsson, & Ekstrand, 2018; Mercer & Perkins, 2014; Perron & Holmes, 2011). For that reason, the perceptions of patients in general are constructed from normative, context‐bound perspectives about how women and men should behave, act and talk (Eivergård et al., 2018; Hamilton & Manias, 2006)—that is, how they should or do perform gender (Butler, 2007).…”

“…In research on the topic, particularly on how healthcare professionals discussed patients in a somatic context, Hedegaard (2019) found that the staff did not convey sufficient awareness of patients who exhibited gender‐normative behaviour and, when discussing such patients, communicated primarily about their medical conditions. However, the opposite was true when patients somehow deviated from socially accepted gender norms.…”

“…In adopting the perspective of social constructionism in our study, gender is understood as a social construction within socially, discursively constructed reality (Crowe, 2006; Yazdannik, Yousefy, & Mohammadi, 2017). From that perspective, we also assumed that discursive formations define not only conceptions of what is possible to think and say about men in forensic psychiatric care, especially forensic psychiatric wards, at certain times but also ways of categorising patients, understanding their subjecthood and perceiving their identities in relation to context‐dominant norms (Dowd, 2010; Hedegaard, 2019; Perron & Holmes, 2011).…”