Comment: Do you hear what we say? Reconstructing language codes for professionals and patients

Abstract

Patients have traditionally been expected by health professionals to adopt the passive role implied by tiieir name. 'How are we today?' asks the hospital consultant stepping briskly round the ward with his students. 'Good, good!' His breezy response nearly obliterates the expected reply of; 'Not too bad doctor,' murmured by the recumbant figure in the bed. In fact the patient is desperate to know whedier die excruciating pain she feels is an expected result of the operation or something worse. She cranes forward to hear what the consultant, with his back to her, is saying about her case to the students, but all she can catch are fragments of foreign sounding medical terms. With luck, the nurse will explain to her later.

General practitioners who are, after all, not performing a dual function of teaching as well as examining the patient, may be expected to take more notice of what the patient has to say. But the need to be in control and the pressure of time all too often mean that die GP seems to talk at rather than to die patient. There is no time for a productive period of silence after the routine question: 'Have you anything you would like to ask me?' A few seconds more and the patient might actually say what is really on her mind as well as the headaches she has come about.