Communication in Prehospital and Emergency Care: A State-of-the-Art Literature Review of Conversation-Analytic Research

ABSTRACT

This article is a state-of-the-art review of research published between 2012 and 2022 on language and social interaction in prehospital and in-hospital emergency settings, conducted within the intersecting methodologies of conversation analysis (CA), interactional linguistics, multimodal analysis, and ethnomethodology. A total of 52 studies are discussed, grouped into three interaction types: prehospital care interaction (medical emergency calls, paramedic interaction), in-hospital interactions in the emergency department, and simulated emergency medical care interactions. I synthesize the main topics and major contributions of CA research in prehospital and emergency care, then highlight some lingering questions and knowledge gaps. Finally, I suggest possible areas in which CA can make an applied contribution in the near future, in partnership with the medical field. Data reported in the review are in multiple languages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Left-dislocation is a syntactic structure that makes it possible to place a new referent turn-initially, and can therefore break up information into smaller, more manageable chunks. The example provided in Svennevig et al. (2017, pp. 11–12) is, “so now the other a:rm (0.7) so the one furthest from you, (0.4) you’re gonna take that arm, (0.5) and you’re gonna place the ha:nd on the doll’s stomach”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institut Universitaire de France.