Speaker: Professor Alison Pilnick

Alison Pilnick is Professor of Language, Health and Society at Manchester Metropolitan University. For the last 30 years she has been researching communication between healthcare professionals and their patients or clients, in hospitals, clinics, GP surgeries and wherever else those interactions take place. She has worked with professionals including GPs, surgeons, anaesthetists, midwives, nurses, pharmacists and physiotherapists, in the UK and overseas. Her aim is to produce communication training resources that are underpinned by high quality social science research. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and the Academy of Social Sciences.

Synopsis

Much, if not most of healthcare is delivered (at least in part) through talk, either face-to-face, or increasingly, over the phone. Yet communication (or the lack of it) is consistently the largest single subject category of NHS complaints in hospital and community settings. Healthcare professionals are very aware that they find communication in particular settings or with particular groups challenging, but their training is often based on what we think we know about how to communicate well. Things that may seem like a good idea in the abstract don’t necessarily translate well into practice, and approaches that may work in everyday conversation can’t necessarily be transported into healthcare settings. Drawing on 30 years of research studying audio and video recordings of interactions between healthcare professionals and their patients or clients, I will show why some of the things that are done with the best of intentions can create problems, and why we need to study actual interaction to create good healthcare training.