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Challenging previous models of communication between patients and doctors, this publication explains how making it a broader, team-focused, non-technical encounter can improve patient outcomes as well as increase patient safely in clinical settings.

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This book challenges functional models for more aesthetic and ethical models, where communication is grounded in values systems of cultures. Here, communication is treated as a distributed phenomenon involving networks of persons, activities and artifacts, and extends beyond doctor-patient relationships to working in and across teams around patients. The purpose of the book is to stimulate thinking about how patient care and safety may be improved through a focus upon the ´non-technical´ work of doctors - interpersonal communication, teamwork and situation awareness in teams. The focus is then not on the personality of the doctor, but on the dynamics of relationships which form doctors´ multiple identities.

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Foreword

Introduction

Part I: Communication in medicine: democracy and its discontents

Chapter 1: Communication hypocompetence - an iatrogenic epidemic

Chapter 2: Democracy in medicine

Chapter 3: Patient-centeredness without a center

Chapter 4: How doctors think can be judged from how they listen and speak

Chapter 5: A new wave of patient-centeredness

Chapter 6: Models of patient-centered care

Chapter 7: What is meant by ´empathy´?

Chapter 8: Gender matters in medical education

Part II: Deep theorizing in communication in medicine: relationships between team process and practitioner identity

Chapter 9: Working and learning in ´teams´ in a new era of health care

Chapter 10: Theorizing team process through cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT): networking and knotworking

Chapter 11: Theorizing team process through a Foucauldian perspective: gaining a voice in team activity at the clinical coalface

Chapter 12: Theorizing team process through actor-network-theory (ANT): communication practice as a theory in action

Chapter 13: Theorizing team process through Deleuzean rhizomatics: becoming a medical professional in nomadic teams

Chapter 14: Team process and complexity theory: blunting Occam´s Razor

Chapter 15: Building a collaborative community in medical education research

Part III: A brief but provocative conclusion

Chapter 16: Conclusion: professing medical identities in the liquid world of teams

Bibliography

Index

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