Communication and Medicine最新文献

Shared decision making depends on respectful dialogue that allows patients and clinicians to discuss medical facts and the beliefs and values that give them meaning for a particular patient. This dialogue is most likely to succeed when tests and treatments are placed within a purpose-oriented landscape that sets goals of care in the foreground so that the direction of decision making is clear before too much focus is placed on interventional options. The beliefs and values that guide patients allow them to identify and prioritize their most important goals of care in light of other dimensions of decision making. These beliefs and values will also reveal concepts of health that anchor goals of care. When patients and clinicians disagree about treatments or goals, it may be because a clinician is guided by a biostatistical concept of health, while a patient is guided by one that prioritizes well-being. Such disagreements may also be described in terms of patient preference (autonomy) and the clinician's assessment of the patient's best interests (beneficence). By probing the beliefs and values that explain goals of care and concepts of health, dialogue can help reconcile disagreements in shared decision making. And even when resolution is not forthcoming, and a decision must be 'un-shared', dialogue can demonstrate respect for patients through the consideration clinicians show when they take time to understand and explain.

The ability to empathise with patients is an important professional skill for doctors. Medical students practise this skill as part of their medical education, and are tested on their use of empathy within their final examination. Evidence shows that appropriate training makes a difference but that natural aptitude also plays a role. Most medical schools, therefore, probe applicants' basic understanding of empathy at admissions interviews. The purpose of the project presented in this paper was to apply existing understanding of how empathy may be communicated in a clinical context (building on a literature review by Pounds [2011]) to develop a new empathy-specific medical admissions interview station, probing applicants' empathic communicative performance (not just theoretical knowledge) and fitting the widely used Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) format. The paper outlines how this tool was developed, trialled and implemented by: (1) conceptualising empathic communication in discourse-pragmatic terms - that is, as a set of specific but context-dependant empathic speech acts; and (2) formulating and trialling a written and two oral versions of a situational test, capable of probing the applicants' ability to communicate empathically in everyday conversation and suitable for use at Norwich Medical School and other similar educational institutions.

The study of metaphor in psychotherapy is undergoing a 'contextual turn', shifting emphasis from global mechanisms underlying metaphors and therapeutic change to their naturally occurring properties in therapist-patient interaction. While there have been rich qualitative and contextual descriptions of metaphors in psychotherapy, complementary quantitative accounts of metaphor usage patterns over larger amounts of talk have been less forthcoming. This paper reports metaphor usage patterns as associations between key contextual variables which characterize metaphors in a dataset of Chinese psychotherapy talk. A total of 2893 metaphor vehicle terms from 29.5 hours of talk were coded for SPEAKER, FUNCTION, TARGET, PHASE OF THERAPY, and DYAD. A loglinear analysis revealed significant higher order associations (DYAD*TARGET*FUNCTION*PHASE; DYAD*FUNCTION*PHASE*SPEAKER; TARGET*FUNCTION*SPEAKER), discussed as usage patterns which bear implications for the psychotherapeutic application of metaphor. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.