A Communication Perspective on What Patient Advisory Boards Do: Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis and Negotiating...

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Communication Studies
• Qualitative Research Methods

Background:

• Stakeholder advisory boards are crucial for patient-centered research.
• Engaging diverse perspectives can create tensions with research team constraints.
• Limited research exists on how these tensions are navigated in practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe and apply a communication framework for analyzing patient advisory council (PAC) interactions.
• To examine how advice-giving and advice-receiving dynamics unfold within a PAC meeting.
• To understand how potential tensions between patient input and research agendas are managed.

Main Methods:

• Utilized Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis (AIDA), an observational method.
• Analyzed recorded and transcribed interactions from a PAC meeting for a comparative effectiveness study.
• Focused on two excerpts illustrating advice implementation and non-implementation.

Main Results:

• Advice within PACs often emerges organically through subtle conversational exchanges.
• Analysis demonstrated how PAC members navigated advice-giving and receiving.
• Identified instances where advice was implemented versus deemed unfeasible by the study team.

Conclusions:

• Advice is an inherent, often unannounced, component of PAC work.
• Analyzing these negotiated moments can enhance communication and team dynamics.
• Regular discussion of advice exchange within PACs is recommended for improved collaboration.