scholarly journals Caution and compliance in medical encounters. Non-interpretation of hedges and phatic tokens

Author(s):  
Michaela Albl-Mikasa ◽  
Elisabeth Glatz ◽  
Gertrud Hofer ◽  
Marina Sleptsova

Our paper is based on the Swiss research project ‘Interpreting in Medical Settings: Roles, Requirements and Responsibility’, which was supported by a grant of the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (KTI) and carried out by an interdisciplinary team comprising medical specialists from the University Hospital of Basel (Marina Sleptsova and colleagues) and interpreting studies/applied linguistics researchers from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) (Gertrud Hofer and colleagues). It explores videotape transcriptions of 12 authentic interpreted conversations between German speaking doctors/medical staff and patients of Turkish or Albanian origin. The analysis finds that culture-specific expressions produced by the patients occur rarely and do not pose any interpreting problems. By contrast, phatic tokens and hedges play an important role in medical personnel’s presentation of their interactional, trust building, diagnostic and therapeutic intentions. Although these expressions are essential communication elements geared at building patients’ compliance and establishing doctors’ safeguards, they are rarely or inconsistently rendered by the interpreters. It is argued that, while medical interpreters may have plausible reasons not to render these expressions, they would still need to be made aware of the significance of such pragmatic aspects of communication in training courses and/or pre-encounter briefings. More generally, empirical research – similar to that on questioning style and questioning techniques – should focus more on the exploration of discourse markers, meta-discourse comments and rapport-building expressions of different types of utterance and discourse practices in healthcare interpreting settings.

2018 ◽  
pp. 271-290
Author(s):  
Romina Mählmann ◽  
John Wrae Stanley

This is a report on the initial efforts made to develop phenomenological and hermeneutical methods for didactical use and epistemological research in communicology and translatology. The following analysis deals with a face-to-faceinteraction workshop that took place at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne in January 2012. The primary goal of this workshop was to establish whether or not an adaptation of the Husserlian phenomenological method could be applied within the framework of role plays, i.e., to see to what extent the phenomenological method makes it possible to observe oneself reflectively while actively participating in role plays. In toto, 14 English and German speaking participants took part in different role plays simulating the job-interview process. For this purpose the phenomenological and hermeneutical methods were explicated in an introductory phase and – at least at a rudimentary level – employed in the role plays. During the role plays, the primary tool employed to disclose verbal, para-verbal and non-verbal phenomena used in communication was the phenomenological method. After the role plays, a hermeneutical analysis was done in one selected group. The participants involved were asked to talk about the experiences they made during the role play; this was done while watching a video of the role plays, and it was designed to access the meaning of various verbal, para-verbal and non-verbal phenomena. Especially the comparison of their feelings, thoughts and perceptions with those of other participants was quite informative.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 1427-1435
Author(s):  
Camille Boutillier ◽  
Luc Jeanrenaud ◽  
Jean-Luc Gilles ◽  
Laurence Bouche ◽  
Jocelyne Quillet Cotting

AbstractThe Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV, Switzerland) is a university hospital with more than 11,000 employees who perform clinical, research and teaching roles. It was ranked in March 2019 among the ten best hospitals in the world according to the magazine Newsweek. The education scheme of the CHUV includes the practical training of more than 1700 young people, in particular from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland (HES-SO). This research and development, carried out in collaboration with the University of Teacher Education of State of Vaud (UTE Vaud), has enabled the creation and implementation of a cyclical method for evaluating the satisfaction of HES-SO healthcare students at CHUV. The method created and tested—the Cycle of Construction and Quality Control for Satisfaction Evaluations (CCQCSE)—comprises nine stages: Issues, Analysis, Design, Items, Information, Collection, Processing, Feedback and Adjustment. It was designed with the help of a multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals (CHUV) and experts in education sciences (UTE Vaud) as part of a master’s thesis (Kaeser 2018) directed by our research team. A 4-month pilot phase allowed more than 250 placement students’ satisfaction levels to be collected with respect to ten aspects of the practical training scheme, and provided diagnostic feedback. Identifying strengths and areas for improvement has significantly helped with the development of a quality policy for student training at the institution. CCQCSE is now considered as a robust method in line with the quality measures already in place at CHUV. In particular, it encouraged those responsible for the practical training to reflect on their mentoring practices. Beyond the context of CHUV and the mentoring of healthcare students on placements, the CCQCSE model could be transferred to other sectors in which training placements are offered, opening up new avenues of collaborative research.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 2514183X1984253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürg Kesselring

The Swiss Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry was founded in 1917 by Constantin von Monakow (1853–1930), the first professor of neurology at the University of Zurich and founder of the Swiss Neurological Society. The carefully bound booklets of these Archives are to be found completely in the scientific library of the Psychiatric University Hospital Burghölzli in Zürich. It is hoped that this treasure trove of knowledge will be preserved for all those interested in the history of neurology and psychiatry in its integrity. Today’s work in and on this archives allows time and again to bring out older works and to present them in the light of more modern concepts. Of medical–historical interest is also the category of obituaries, occurring in almost all issues, virtually a “Who’s Who” of neurologists and psychiatrists who have laid the foundations for our subjects.


VASA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thalhammer ◽  
Aschwanden ◽  
Jeanneret ◽  
Labs ◽  
Jäger

Background: Haemostatic puncture closure devices for rapid and effective hemostasis after arterial catheterisation are a comfortable alternative to manual compression. Implanting a collagen plug against the vessel wall may become responsible for other kind of vascular injuries i.e. thrombotic or stenotic lesions and peripheral embolisation. The aim of this paper is to report our clinically relevant vascular complications after Angio-Seal® and to discuss the results in the light of the current literature. Patients and methods: We report the symptomatic vascular complications in 17 of 7376 patients undergoing diagnostic or therapeutic catheterisation between May 2000 and March 2003 at the University Hospital Basel. Results: Most patients presented with ischaemic symptoms, arterial stenoses or occlusions and thrombotic lesions (n = 14), whereas pseudoaneurysms were extremely rare (n = 3). Most patients with ischaemic lesions underwent vascular surgery and all patients with a pseudoaneurysm were successfully treated by ultrasound-guided compression. Conclusions: Severe vascular complications after Angio-Seal® are rare, consistent with the current literature. There may be a shift from pseudoaneurysms to ischaemic lesions.


1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (05) ◽  
pp. 365-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Timmeis ◽  
J. H. van Bemmel ◽  
E. M. van Mulligen

AbstractResults are presented of the user evaluation of an integrated medical workstation for support of clinical research. Twenty-seven users were recruited from medical and scientific staff of the University Hospital Dijkzigt, the Faculty of Medicine of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and from other Dutch medical institutions; and all were given a written, self-contained tutorial. Subsequently, an experiment was done in which six clinical data analysis problems had to be solved and an evaluation form was filled out. The aim of this user evaluation was to obtain insight in the benefits of integration for support of clinical data analysis for clinicians and biomedical researchers. The problems were divided into two sets, with gradually more complex problems. In the first set users were guided in a stepwise fashion to solve the problems. In the second set each stepwise problem had an open counterpart. During the evaluation, the workstation continuously recorded the user’s actions. From these results significant differences became apparent between clinicians and non-clinicians for the correctness (means 54% and 81%, respectively, p = 0.04), completeness (means 64% and 88%, respectively, p = 0.01), and number of problems solved (means 67% and 90%, respectively, p = 0.02). These differences were absent for the stepwise problems. Physicians tend to skip more problems than biomedical researchers. No statistically significant differences were found between users with and without clinical data analysis experience, for correctness (means 74% and 72%, respectively, p = 0.95), and completeness (means 82% and 79%, respectively, p = 0.40). It appeared that various clinical research problems can be solved easily with support of the workstation; the results of this experiment can be used as guidance for the development of the successor of this prototype workstation and serve as a reference for the assessment of next versions.


1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (01/02) ◽  
pp. 75-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. D. Appel ◽  
O. Golaz ◽  
Ch. Pasquali ◽  
J.-C. Sanchez ◽  
A. Bairoch ◽  
...  

Abstract:The sharing of knowledge worldwide using hypermedia facilities and fast communication protocols (i.e., Mosaic and World Wide Web) provides a growth capacity with tremendous versatility and efficacy. The example of ExPASy, a molecular biology server developed at the University Hospital of Geneva, is striking. ExPASy provides hypermedia facilities to browse through several up-to-date biological and medical databases around the world and to link information from protein maps to genome information and diseases. Its extensive access is open through World Wide Web. Its concept could be extended to patient data including texts, laboratory data, relevant literature findings, sounds, images and movies. A new hypermedia culture is spreading very rapidly where the international fast transmission of documents is the central element. It is part of the emerging new “information society”.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Stättermayer ◽  
F Riedl ◽  
S Bernhofer ◽  
A Stättermayer ◽  
A Mayer ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 665-666
Author(s):  
Mirosław Chorazewski

Abstract It is with great sadness that we inform our readers about the recent death of Professor Stefan Ernst. Stefan Ernst was born in Piaśniki, Upper Silesia, on November 03, 1934, to parents of Polish-German descent. His primary education started during the war at a German-speaking school in Wirek and continued in Olesno, where he also got his secondary education. As chemistry studies were not yet available at the University ofWrocław in 1953, he started studying biology and switched to chemistry a year later. He received his master’s degree in chemistry in 1959, as one of the first graduates in that major. Then, he started his work on application of thermodynamics and molecular acoustics in investigation of liquid phases under the guidance of the Prof. Bogusława Jeżowska-Trzebiatowska. On 28 November 1967, he defended his PhD thesis entitled “Association-Dissociation Equilibria and the Structure of Uranyl Compounds in Organic Solvents” at the University of Wrocław. Professor Stefan Ernst was a linguist, a polyglot, a renowned thermodynamisist and a researcher of molecular acoustics. With great regret and shock we have learned of his sudden and unexpected death on August 03, 2014, in a hospital in Kraków.


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