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Pål Gulbrandsen has registered as a Scientia Fellows host. Our suggested broad thematic area is Clinician-Patient Communication and Adherence and subfield is Quality of Communication with Old Patients. The postdoc position, if the applicant succeeds, will be connected to the projects announced in the post below. Contact Dr. Gulbrandsen at his e-mail address, to be found at the website www.uio.no if you have questions.

OCHER lead Pål Gulbrandsen has received one grant from the Norwegian Research Council (NRC) that will fund 2 PhD students for 3 years, and one grant from Helse Sør-Øst (Southeast Norway Regional Hospital Trust – HSØ) covering 1 PhD student for 3 years.

The NRC project will explore medication information quality when older patients hospitalized with heart failure are discharged to their homes. We will apply audiotapes of doctor/patient conversations, interviews, collection of written material, home visits, and questionnaires in a mixed methods approach. The study will require complex and comprehensive longitudinal data collection.

The HSØ project aims to study how 1st year residents deal with and communicate about uncertainty. We will apply questionnaires, field work with extensive use of audiotapes and interviews to increase understanding of characteristics of persons, situations, reasoning, and possible remedies to help residents’ quicker adaptation of good ways to handle uncertainty.

The PhD students will have to be very well organized, able to communicate and collaborate with an array of people, and with analytical minds. We hope to be able to announce the positions within 2 months. We will consider a background in medicine or psychology an advantage, but are open to others with relevant backgrounds. Unfortunately, we cannot employ people without excellent working knowledge of a Scandinavian language, because data collection will include interviews with older Norwegian patients and ability to pick up important uncertainty cues during field work.

If you consider yourself a future applicant, please send and e-mail to Pål Gulbrandsen, who will consider sharing the project description with you. You will find the address at uio.no.

The annual OCHER research workshop on communication in healthcare has since 2012 been an important event for researchers to present their studies in early phases, in order to improve proposals, analyses, and papers. It has also been a forum aimed at connecting young researchers in several countries, including the Scandinavian countries, Germany, the Netherlands, and UK. That’s why we hoped to attract a sufficient amount of abstracts to run the workshop also in 2021, despite the pandemic. However, we received fewer abstracts than our limit, and decided to cancel the workshop before registration deadline.

We aim to arrange a new workshop in January 12-14, 2022. Invitation e-mails and announcement will come in August 2021.

The Covid-19 pandemic has introduced major shifts in the ways we communicate with others in formal institutional/workplace settings. This Special Issue aims to investigate the findings of experts and users with respect to the different forms of remote or technologically-mediated communication that were often adopted on the spot from a variety of theoretical angles and methodological perspectives (conversation/discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography of communication and linguistic anthropology). For enquiries, please contact the guest editors:

Anne Bannink e.a.bannink@uva.nl

Jet Van Dam  h.r.vandamvanisselt@uva.nl

Deadline is extended to November 1st, 2020.  Call for papers at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages/special_issues/Institutional_Discourse

We are pleased to announce two very interesting keynote speakers for OCHER 2021, Sarah Bigi and Marie-Anne Durand. 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.

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.

We have now made our update of the publication list of OCHER members working in Norway. This time we have added 28 papers to the list. Search term used in PubMed is (Gulbrandsen P OR Finset A OR Eide H OR Svennevig J OR Gerwing J OR Ofstad EH OR Kasper J OR Steinsbekk A OR Menichetti J), limited backward to 2 July 2019. This search returned 80+ papers, but some were already included, and some were not related to OCHER (Kasper J includes several other authors than “our” Kasper).

As it looks now on July 2 in Europe, we remain in the hope that it will be possible to run the OCHER 2021 on January 13-15 as planned. We have had some delay in planning for keynote speakers. We hope to be able to announce them by mid July. We have not changed the dates for the rest of the preparations: By August 15: Invitation will be sent to former participants, and announced. Abstract deadline will be September 15. If less than 25 abstracts, we will cancel the workshop. Registration deadline will be October 5 and non-negotiable. If less than 40 registrations, we will cancel the workshop. October 19 is our last date for cancelling, however, we will make clear that changes in the course of the pandemic might make us cancel the event at any time.

Today, on April 1, 2020, it is impossible to predict how the COVID-19 pandemic will evolve and change the world over the next months and maybe years. At this stage, we remain in the hope that it will be possible to run the OCHER 2021 on January 13-15 as planned. This is how we will proceed: By June 20: Keynote speakers will be announced. By August 15: Invitation will be sent to former participants, and announced. Abstract deadline will be September 15. If less than 25 abstracts, we will cancel the workshop. Registration deadline will be October 5 and non-negotiable. If less than 40 registrations, we will cancel the workshop. October 20 is our tentative last date for cancelling, however, we will make clear that changes in the course of the pandemic might make us cancel the event at any time. We are currently negotiating terms with the hotel.

Maria Grazia Rossi, who works in Lisbon and visited OCHER this year, organizes a workshop in Lisbon in the middle of June. Look it up at this website: https://metacare.fcsh.unl.pt/call-for-poster-2nd-conference-on-caring-discourse/

At OCHER 2020, the annual research workshop on communication in healthcare at Thon Hotel Triaden, close to Oslo, we have now accepted more than 30 abstracts. We have two international keynote speakers, Arwen Pieterse and Merran Toerien. This year’s workshop features plenary workshops as well as three plenary presentations of submitted abstracts. Here is the Program 9th OCHER 2020 – final Oct 7 2019. We have a bunch of new, interesting presenters from several countries, including Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK. Save the dates January 15-17.