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The claims of qualitative research are often based on being physically present in a setting and the ability that gives to record interactional features unavailable to quantitative research. In a medical context, this can involve a number of scenarios which include observing medical encounters or interviewing patients.The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has made such co-presence impractical. This short paper discusses ways around this problem. It also demonstrates that, in a digital age, being 'present' in the 'field' needs to be reconsidered.
A team leader's request is a crucial factor for successful team interaction to ensure patient safety in emergency care. This study examines how team leaders accomplish and frame immediate requests through language use and corresponding eye-movement patterns in emergency care simulation, focusing on when the team is led by a senior doctor (SD) and when it is led by a junior doctor (JD). The team included two foundation doctors, who are in their first two years in medical practice, two emergency department (ED) nurses and one ED expert. They were recorded undertaking separate simulated operations on a simulated patient, and the team leader wore eye-tracking glasses. Interactional linguistic and multimodal analyses of video, audio and eye-movement data revealed that SD made immediate requests to the team members with multimodal emphasis - i.e., gazed at the recipients and addressed them verbally, especially when asking for recipients' actions - while JD often used only gaze in requesting such actions. Although our study has limitations in terms of the small size of the data, the findings nevertheless highlight that the leader's requesting was framed and ascribed in the continuum from a question to an instruction through co-construction of joint action with recipients in the social interaction.
Empathy is believed to play a key function in clinical consultations. As online medical consultation (OMC) has become increasingly popular in the past decade, studies addressing empathic communication in the OMC context have started to attract research interest. However, previous studies have mainly addressed empathic communicative acts by online doctors. There is still a research gap as regards exploring online empathic communication from both doctors' and patients' perspectives, particularly in the context of China where there is a promising growth in OMC activities. The present study examines 150 text-based OMC cases that involve empathic interaction between doctors and patients/caregivers in the Chinese context. Adopting a theme-oriented discourse analysis approach, the paper aims to identify empathic communication sequences. Four types of sequence organization are identified, and these are discussed with relevant examples. The findings illustrate that OMC communication involves dynamic empathic sequential patterns, which can be optimally drawn upon by health professionals and medical students to practise their empathic communication skills.

