We aim to arrange the 10th OCHER research workshop in January 2022 and cross fingers for the pandemic to have subsided sufficiently for an in-person meeting. Both keynote speakers Marie-Anne Durand and Sarah Bigi have agreed to present as was planned for the 2021 workshop which we unfortunately had to cancel because of the pandemic. Bigi works at the Catholic University of Milan, and Durand at the Universities of Toulouse and Lausanne. They represent two radically different but equally important approaches to the study of interactions in medicine, and will definitely add new understanding to our community.
You may expect deadline for abstracts to be September 14, and acceptance will be received by October 1. Registration deadline will be October 4, and deadline for payment will be October 18.
Bigi’s talks:
“Models of interaction in healthcare communication studies: the missing link between theory and practice” – Based on argumentation theory, she will argue in favor of a distinction between models of communication and paradigms of care, which sometimes in the healthcare communication literature seem to be confused or conflated.
“What are people doing when they talk? Challenges in assessing what ‘good communication’ looks like” – She asks: how do we assess the quality of communication if we want to use discursive criteria (and not, for example, patient satisfaction or perceptions)? How can we assess what people are ‘doing to each other’ with their utterances if we cannot analyze people’s intentions? And how do we distinguish between argumentation and explanation in real-life dialogues?
Durand’s talks:
“What Matters Most: Randomized Controlled Trial of Breast Cancer Surgery Conversation Aids Across Socioeconomic Strata” – about the effect of a paper-based pictorial conversation aid (pictures+ text) to patients with early-stage breast cancer. They studied effects across socioeconomic strata as well as between surgeons applying the aids.
“Implementing patient-centered innovations in healthcare: from theory to practice” – about the main implementation frameworks and examples of their use.