Main description:

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.

Contents:

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