Communication strategies in children's diabetes consultations

What is it about?

During the last few decades, ideas of empowerment, person-centred care (PCC) and shared decision-making (SDM) have informed western health care. An increasing interest in conversational styles aligned with these ideas is visible e.g. in the work to make motivational interviewing (MI) an evidence-based communicative practice. But linguistic competence is needed to identify the subtle nuances of the communicative practices in a doctor–patient consultation. It is therefore particularly important to investigate conversation styles in mediated encounters with immigrant patients. Mitigation strategies and confirming strategies are considered to be typical of an ‘empowering’ conversation style. The distribution of these features in encounters with or without interpreters was analysed in a case study of two consultations with the same doctor in a children’s diabetes clinic in Sweden.

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Why is it important?

The way doctors talk and interact with patients affects not only the understanding of how the illness proceeds in the patient, but also relations and feelings. When dealing with a chronic illness such as diabetes, communicative strategies might be used to strengthen the patient's believe in her ability to monitor the illness at home, her self efficacy. However, medical education seldom involves linguistic studies or studies in intercultural communication or the details of interpreter work. The article is a contribution to the understanding of the sort of empowering language that doctor's use more or less intuitively and the problems that can occur in a a mediated consultation.