The Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions

The Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions: Contrasting the communicative styles of U.S. and international nurses is the first book to quantitatively examine a wide range of linguistic features in a corpus of interactions between nurses and standardized patients. The main goal of this book is to compare the discourse of U.S. (L1 English speaking) and international (L2 English speaking) nurses. The research design relies on a mixed method approach, including both quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of lexico-grammatical, interactional, prosodic, fluency, and non-verbal features; assessments of interactional effectiveness; and qualitative interviews with nurses. The book offers a detailed description of the situational characteristics of the interactions and compares the discourse of nurses and patients in order to contextualize differences in the communicative styles of the two nurse groups. The results provide new insight into the way that sociocultural and linguistic aspects of nurse discourse contribute to the delivery of patient-centered care.

Wen Ma, Shandong University, in Discourse Studies 19(6): 732-748:
Staples’ book is a clear, detailed and very insightful resource in the field of nurse–patient interaction. Staples displays great expertise in both discourse analysis and medical discourse, and this book is an excellent resource for researchers and postgraduates whose research interests lie in medical communication, naturally occurring conversation and discourse analysis more generally.