Event Details

Much of healthcare is achieved interactively through talk and writing. In her talk, Professor Robyn Woodward-Kron (University of Melbourne) discusses intraprofessional, interprofessional, and health professional-patient communicative practices that could benefit from a linguistic lens.

A linguistic lens on health communication research and practice: gaps and opportunities, impact, strategies

Robyn Woodward-Kron, PhD

Professor, Healthcare Communication

Melbourne Medical School, University of Melbourne, Australia

Much of healthcare is achieved interactively through talk and writing: accessing care, diagnosing, making treatment decisions, carrying out treatment, coordinating care, handing over care. For health professional students, learning the influential patterns of talk and writing, the discursive practices of healthcare, is integral to becoming a health practitioner. For regulatory and accreditation bodies, the quality and safety of these discursive practices is paramount, necessitating cycles of review and improvement. These discursive practices must also be inclusive for diverse populations. How these practices (healthcare communication) are conceptualised, their scope, and the evidence informing education, training, and policies is therefore a critical interdisciplinary question.

In this talk, I discuss intraprofessional, interprofessional, and health professional-patient communicative practices that could benefit from a linguistic lens (gaps and opportunities), give examples of productive collaborations (impact), and reflect on hits and misses (strategies).

Bio

Robyn Woodward-Kron is a Professor in the Department of Medical Education, Melbourne Medical School at the University of Melbourne. Informed by her PhD in educational linguistics, her research interests are at the intersection of language, communication and health professions education, with a particular interest in intercultural communication. She collaborates with clinician researchers and educators, for example, to develop resources to promote inclusiveness for culturally and linguistically diverse people in clinical trials; in translational research in a range of clinical settings, and in entry-to-practice medical education. Robyn was made a Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators in 2019.

This seminar is organised by the Language Testing Research Group, Department of Linguistics and English Language.