Discourse types and (re)distribution of responsibility in simulated emergency team encounters

Abstract

Successful teamwork, constitutive of team talk, depends largely on shared responsibility in the coordination of tasks in a goal-oriented way. This paper examines how specific modes of talk or 'discourse types' are utilised by a healthcare team in simulated emergency care. The data corpus comprises six video-recorded simulation training sessions in an emergency department at a large Norwegian hospital. Our analysis focuses on the critical moment when the original healthcare team is joined by other specialists in an ad hoc manner, which necessitates the (re)distribution of expert responsibility in the management of the patient's condition. We examine the interactional trajectories and, in particular, the discourse types surrounding the critical moment which marks the incorporation of the new team members. The analysis centres on three discourse types (online commentary, offline commentary and metacommentary) that are utilised in accomplishing the multiple tasks in a collaborative and coordinated fashion. We suggest that team talk overlays and overlaps with distributed medical work in highly charged decision-making contexts such as emergency care. The findings have relevance for how healthcare professionals and students are trained in multidisciplinary team talk and teamwork.

Linguistic and Communicative Practices in the US Military’s Response to the COVID-19 Emergency

“…Other US military models and practices that have demonstrated their usefulness in making decisions and coping with the pandemic include: 1. Acquaintance with emergency management and emergency medicine (Parasidis 2015;Sarangi 2017;Nevitt 2020;Gibson-Fall 2021) in precarious situations, resulting in the establishment of precedents and protocols related to many of the parameters and bioethical choices that emerged during the first wave of COVID-19 (e.g., treatment with limited medical resources and within a hostile environment, choosing who to cure based on their chances of survival, reduced decisional power of patients in medical matters). 2.…”