Health dialogues between pupils and school nurses: a description of the verbal interaction

The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the content of and the verbal interaction in health dialogues between pupils and school nurses.

Twenty-four health dialogues were recorded using a video camera and the conversations were analysed using the paediatric version of the Roter Interaction analysis system.

The results showed that the age appropriate topics suggested by national recommendations were brought up in most of the health dialogues. The nurses were the ones who talked most, in terms of utterances. The pupils most frequently gave information about their lifestyle and agreed with the nurses' statements. The nurses summarised and checked that they had understood the pupils, asked closed-ended questions about lifestyle and gave information about lifestyle. Strategies aimed to make the pupil more active and participatory in the dialogues were the most widely used verbal interaction approaches by the nurses.

The nurses' use of verbal interaction approaches to promote pupils' activity and participation, trying to build a partnership in the dialogue, could indicate an attempt to build patient-centred health dialogues.

The nurses' great use of questions and being the ones leading the dialogues in terms of utterances point at the necessity for a nurses to have an openness to the pupils own narratives and an attentiveness to what he or she wants to talk about.