Details below for the next event in the UCL Health Communication Network’s seminar series on 5^th December 2023, 1-2pm

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

Live stream link for those who can’t attend: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/93217430863?pwd=dXVxdTN0YkpwWVBNQ1IrVitaTCs4UT09 (Passcode: 42135)

Talks:

• Incorporating a “widening participation” agenda? Language-related considerations in patient recruitment to randomised trials
  Talia Isaacs (Institute of Education department of Culture, Communication and Media), on behalf of the “Beyond must speak English” project

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how some groups in society experience greater disease burden and poorer health outcomes than the wider population. Such societal inequalities have always existed, but there are now arguably more initiatives to begin to address these injustices. This is driven, in part, by agenda-setting from some health research funders to encourage researchers to engage with groups in society that have historically been left behind. This short talk centres on language-related gatekeeping measures when recruiting patients to health intervention research. Highlights from a systematic review of NIHR research reports focusing on UK-based randomised controlled trials (RCTs) expose methodological elements of RCTs that could preclude the participation of ethnically and linguistically diverse patients. This includes considerations of the fairness, accuracy, and consistency of language-related screening during participant recruitment.

• Silenced prohibitions in the birth room
  Rebecca Brione is a module co-lead on Legal and Ethical Issues in Women’s Health at UCL, and a part-time doctoral student in the Sowerby Philosophy and Medicine project at King’s College London

We all want to do things with our words. In healthcare, our words can, but do not always, protect our interests in bodily autonomy and integrity. Take vaginal examination in labour, a common intervention involving digital penetration of a pregnant person’s vagina by a healthcarer. In England, absent rare and unusual circumstances, an individual has an absolute right in law say no to this and similar interventions. Too often, however, those “no”s fail. Some describe the resulting experiences as being like rape. This paper uses concepts from applied philosophy of language to examine what might be going wrong in cases where people’s words fail to do what they intend. I set out the different concurrent actions a pregnant person may be (trying to) perform with her words when she says “no”, and argue that, at least in some cases, people are being silenced when they attempt to refuse unwanted examination.

The Network’s first event as a space where UCL researchers (students and staff) can connect and find out about each other’s work across faculties will take place on 13th October 2022, 1-2pm

The Network will host two talks followed by time for discussions and getting to know each other. The details are as follows:

Date and time: 13^th October  2022, 1-2pm

Location: IOE – 20 Bedford Way, Room W4.01

Talks:

‘A corpus-based approach to identifying linguistic markers of suicidal ideation in Reddit data’ – Andrea Vaughan, Culture, Communication, and Media

In suicidology, a popular research topic is identifying linguistic markers of suicidal ideation in social media text. As research suggests not all people seek professional help for suicidal thoughts or intentions, the objective is typically to use these markers to identify people who could benefit from medical intervention. However, this research often compares data from people writing about suicide with data from others who are not discussing suicide, so it is possible that the currently understood linguistic markers are only indicative of the topic and not of mental health state. To explore this issue, posts on reddit’s r/suicidewatch were compared with the same users’ posts on unthematic subreddits (e.g., r/gardening). This presentation will discuss results from this pilot study and the possible implications for much of the existing research in this field.

The role of linguists in medical lexis reform: lessons from the past and directions for the future – Beth Malory, English Language and Literature

Where medical lexis causes demonstrable harm for patients, how should reforms be implemented? In considering this question, this talk will take as a case study the lexis used in relation to pregnancy loss in English. Here, such reform attempts have, since the 1980s, consisted of informal interventions in medical journals, and latterly more formal ‘consensus statements’ by panels of experts. Despite these attempted interventions, however, no empirical attitudinal data on the lexis used to describe experiences of pregnancy loss have been gathered in decades, and significant dissatisfaction is still reported on social media and in the popular press. Situations such as these raise fundamental questions as to the role of modern linguists. This is, after all, an era when many linguists are involved in producing guidelines for inclusive language use, to safeguard marginalised groups from harm. Against this backdrop, can we cling to the notion of a purely descriptive linguistic discipline, and should we want to? Or do we, as linguists, have a role to play in using our tools and expertise to implement language reforms that are evidence-based, proportionate, and supportive of health and wellbeing?

Live stream link for those who can’t attend: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/98164550979?pwd=T0JoNTV0Y3MvUjRTa1YrTkljd3Qwdz09 (passcode 053572)

Please get in touch (z.demjen@ucl.ac.uk) if you would like to share your work with the Network at one of our sessions. We’d like to host two speakers per seminar, and would be interested in analysis, ideas, approaches, etc. at all stages of development.

Call for Papers:

Starting this October, we (Andrea Vaughan, Sinead Jackson and Zsofia Demjen) are re-launching the UCL Health Communication Network as a space where UCL researchers (students and staff) can connect and find out about each other’s work across faculties.

To this end, we are organising a programme of monthly lunchtime seminars where people present current/ongoing/just finished/just starting work in 15-20min informal presentations followed by discussion and chat. The seminars will be in-person, but also live-streamed for those who can’t be there, and take place on a Thursday 1-2pm. The first three dates are 13^th October, 17^th November, and 15^th December, with more dates coming from January onwards.

We are delighted that we already have presenters for 13^th October and 15^th December. The range of topics include: language and suicidal ideation, metaphor use in alcohol use disorder, language guidelines for adverse gestational events, conversation analysis and communication disorders – details coming soon!

Please get in touch with Zsofia Demjen if you would be up for sharing your work with the group at one of our sessions. We’d like to host two speakers per seminar, and would be interested in analysis, ideas, approaches, etc. at all stages of development.

We are looking forward to getting to know the breadth of health communications research across UCL!

To formally launch the International Consortium for Communication in Healthcare, members of the group (including UCL) will be running a live webinar on Wednesday 23rd September, 8am BST, where you can hear from the panellists about healthcare communication in the age of COVID-19. (more…)