Companions' contributions to information gathering in Chinese outpatient clinical interaction

Patients are commonly accompanied to visit clinicians in Chinese outpatient clinics. Although there has been extensive research on the roles of companions in asymmetric interactions within medical settings, there is a paucity of conversation analytic studies that examine the active participation and contributions of companions on an equal footing in medical consultations. How companions on an equal footing participate and contribute in Chinese outpatient clinical consultations remains under-explored. By employing video recordings of three-party consultations in the Chinese orthopaedic outpatient clinic as the data and adopting conversation analysis as the method, this study investigated how companions participated in and contributed to the information-gathering activity and how their contributions were interactionally negotiated and managed by clinicians and adult patients over sequences of interaction. We showed that companions negotiated epistemic rights in reporting and repairing the information about medical problems in the patients' epistemic domain and displayed different levels of encroachment on patients' epistemic rights by endorsing patients' responses, repairing the information in patients' responses, and offering information directly to clinicians. Companions also exerted deontic authority and shaped the trajectory of the consultations by hindering or facilitating the progressivity of the interaction. We argued that companions' contributions to the information-gathering activity might reflect the family-centred model of the doctor-patient relationship in the Chinese orthopaedic outpatient clinic. Clinicians are suggested to open up opportunities for companions' participation and contributions while respecting patients' rights, especially when there is a collision of knowledge claims between patients and their companions.