"You Should Maybe Work Together a Little Bit": Formulating Requests in Interprofessional Interactions

Area of Science:

• Health communication
• Professional collaboration
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Effective communication is crucial for collaborative practice in healthcare settings.
• Requests between health professionals can be complex, involving social and professional dynamics.
• Understanding how requests are formulated impacts team performance and patient care.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the linguistic strategies used by health professionals when making requests.
• To investigate the range of directness and explicitness in professional requests.
• To examine the impact of politeness strategies on the clarity of requests.

Main Methods:

• Empirical analysis of video-recorded collaborative practice situations.
• Utilized a corpus of interactions from diverse institutional settings.
• Qualitative analysis of request formulation, ranging from authoritative to mitigated, direct to indirect, and explicit to implicit.

Main Results:

• Health professionals employ a wide array of strategies to mitigate the face-threatening nature of requests.
• Requests vary significantly in their directness, explicitness, and politeness levels.
• Politeness strategies, while preserving professional relationships, often result in ambiguous statements.

Conclusions:

• The use of indirect and mitigated requests, while socially adept, can compromise communication clarity.
• Ambiguity in professional requests may impede effective interprofessional collaboration.
• Further research is needed to balance politeness with communicative efficiency in healthcare.