The language of mental health nursing reports: firing paper bullets?

Abstract

A great deal of the caring work of nursing is accomplished and mediated through language. This paper attempts to characterize some of this language in quantitative and stylistic terms in an attempt to characterize the genre of nursing report language. Nursing students (n = 26) and graduate nurses (n = 3) viewed a videotape of a person being interviewed by a psychiatrist and produced written reports. These showed a large proportion of words relating to the person and to feelings and needs, compared to existing databases of the English language in general. The language produced by the participants also contained many modal or modifying words and is similar to spoken rather than written English in terms of the proportion of lexical content. There was much diversity in their descriptions and the vocabulary used to refer to the client. Graduate nurses showed more scepticism of the evidence provided by the video and advocated more investigation and questioning of the client. The use of standard forms and techniques of expression suggests that these reports were assembled on a language production line. Finally, we advocate a more systematic approach to educating nursing students about the power of the language they use.

How Writing Records Reduces Clinical Knowledge: A Field Study of Psychiatric Hospital Wards

“…In other words, the nurses complied with very specific conventions for writing but could accentuate the use of particular linguistic styles. That psychiatric nurses' records adhered to tight conventions has been documented before (Chapman, 1988;Crawford, Johnson, Brown, & Nolan, 1999), but the particular conventions will probably vary according to the organizational practices related to divisions of work and ward types and to sociodemographic variables, such as education, age, culture, and so forth. The importance of the general finding of very tight conventions lies in the inherent power to produce entrapping descriptions of the patients.…”

Les notes « Observations de l’infirmière » du Département de psychiatrie de l’Hôpital Montfort : une source archivistique incontournable en santé mentale

“…Comme le souligne Baron (1990), il ne faut pas se laisser distraire par le texte, car les différents acteurs 4 sont le texte, sous réserve inéluctable à leurs propres situations et limitations existentielles. Les notes « observations de l'infirmière » sont donc une accumulation d'évidences qui représentent l'histoire du patient (Crawford, Johnson, Brown & Nolan, 1999). Sous cet aspect, l'infirmière devient donc l'intermédiaire du patient en consignant ses observations dans le dossier médical.…”

“…L'exemple suivant est représentatif des notes qu'on peut retrouver dans la majorité des dossiers médicaux. -06-1992 Ces données peuvent sembler banales et peu significatives pour les lecteurs moins expérimentés, mais elles constituent un bon indicateur de l'influence de la maladie sur les besoins essentiels des patients, de leur état émotionnel et de l'évolution de leur état mental au cours de leur hospitalisation en psychiatrie (Crawford, Johnson, Brown & Nolan, 1999 ;Henderson, 1961).…”

‘She's manipulative and he's right off’: A critical analysis of psychiatric nurses’ oral and written language in the acute inpatient setting

“…In the work of Parker and Wiltshire (1995), the language of nurses’ handovers was found to contain not only elements of dispassionate and technical medical language, but also a more empathic, embodied language. Research undertaken by Crawford et · al . (1999) and O’Brien (1999) addressed nurses’ documentation and speech in the psychiatric setting.…”