We would like to invite you to the first event in the UCL Health Communication Network’s seminar series for this academic year.

Date: 17^th Oct 2023, 1-2pm

Location: IOE – 20 Bedford Way, Room C3.14

Talk:

“But here in this country”: Interactional Competence for clinical communication in intercultural contexts

Dr. David Wei Dai, International Centre for Intercultural Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London  

Effective clinical communication is crucial to patient safety in healthcare. However in Australia alone, 500,000 patients are harmed by the hospitals they go to, with 95% of the incidents having a communication failure component (IC4CH, 2023). One reason why clinical communication can be challenging is that both patients and their health providers oftentimes need to navigate complex and sometimes differing and conflicting workplace and cultural norms, practices and beliefs, making clinical communication a form of Professional Intercultural Communication (PICC).

In this talk I first explicate the complexities of PICC, using discourse-based examples where two patients communicate with their dentists who share different cultural backgrounds. I then propose a theoretical model of PICC to differentiate the inference we make about one another and the practice we observe in each other in PICC. I argue the concept of Interactional Competence can bridge inference and practice, offering a route to assisting both health providers and their patients to co-develop the abilities in handling PICC. Using discourse data analysed through Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis, I highlight how 1) understanding the interactional process of PICC, and 2) developing the ability to interact (Interactional Competence), are crucial to improving clinician-patient relationship and patient safety in PICC.

IC4CH. (2023). Introducing the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/centres/centre-applied-linguistics/international-consortium-communication-health-care

Live stream link for those who can’t attend: (https://ucl.zoom.us/j/91423628654?pwd=SVBJbkZQbDdLalJKSEtZUEVTYVlSQT09

Passcode: 701285)