Intergroup Communication and Health Care

Communication in open disclosure conversations about adverse events in hospitals

“…Open disclosure is the process whereby clinicians engage with patients following an adverse event in hospital that has caused the patient harm. CAT takes account of the intergroup culture that exists in hospitals where status differentials often exist between members of different health professions and also between patients and health professionals (see Hewett et al, 2009aHewett et al, , 2009bGallois, 2002, 2007;Watson et al, 2012). We propose that interactions between patients and doctors are intergroup encounters, it is most often the group membership of each participant (patient or doctor) that is salient rather than the personal characteristics of the two interactants.…”

“…CAT is a general theory of communication that has been applied to a number of contexts including health care (e.g., Gasiorek and van de Poel, 2012;Hewett et al, 2009aHewett et al, , 2009bWatson and Gallois, 2007;Watson et al, 2012;Williams et al, 1990). The theory posits communication as a dynamic process in which each interactant plays an active role in a conversation.…”

What do you do when you can't accommodate? Managing and evaluating problematic interactions in a multilingual medical environment

“…Second, the sample was drawn from a fairly specific populationdhospital doctors who use one or more foreign languages in the workplace, and who volunteered to complete the surveydand so the generalizability of its findings may be limited. That said, the incidents doctors reported were real interactions (not artificial or researcherconstructed vignettes) in an important context (e.g., Watson et al, 2012), both of which are considerable strengths. Third, this study only addresses doctors' perspectives.…”

“…Lack of mutual understanding in doctor-patient communication poses very real risks for patient health, as it can lead to misunderstandings about both diagnosis and treatment (Epstien et al, 2005;Watson et al, 2012). Doctors' communication skills are also an important component of their professional identity, and are linked to perceptions of their competence as medical professionals (Gasiorek and Van de Poel, 2012).…”

The Communication of Wisdom

“…Examples of how communication and language research can add to the ongoing scholarly conversation concerning wisdom can be found in my own and my graduate students' programmatic research exploring communication and aging, the work of James Pennebaker (e.g., Pennebaker, 2011;Pennebaker & Stone, 2003), and recent reports by physician/researchers intuiting the significance of communication and language use within health care practice (Watson, Hewett, & Gallois, 2012). Bergstrom (1995) and Bergstrom and Nussbaum (1996) compared the conflict resolution styles of 50 young adults (aged 18-25), 50 middle-aged adults (aged 30-45), and 50 individuals in later adulthood (aged older than 50).…”