Professional medical communication in war conditions: Gender aspect

Aim: To investigate the features of professional medical communication in wartime through the prism of gender characteristics based on the analysis of authentic dialogues from clinical conversations.

Materials and Methods: Bibliosemantic, content, psychosemantic, and comparative analysis; empirical methods: observing the living language of doctors and patients, creating and typologising the collection of authentic doctor-patient dialogues. The authentic audio and video recordings of 232 doctor-patient dialogues were collected. After conducting an initial typology of the dialogues, four samples were created: «male» and «female doctors», «male» and «female patients». The dialogues were transcribed and subjected to content analysis using the «Textanz» software (v. 2.3).

Results: The psycholinguistic features of professional medical communication in each of the four studied samples were established. For example, male doctors have higher speech activity within their professional role (181 words vs. 138 for female doctors). Their speech is characterised by a predominance of verbs and rational structuring. In contrast, female doctors use nominative constructions with a predominance of nouns, pronouns, and adverbs more often, which indicates the objectification of symptoms and an empathic orientation. Female patients show higher speech activity, ask questions more often, and use more emotionally coloured vocabulary and modal words, which indicates increased anxiety.

Conclusions: The study confirms the presence of gender-based models of medical communication, which are exacerbated in wartime. The results of the study can be used in training on the development of communication skills of medical workers, in writing clinical protocols, as well as in psychological support for wounded and displaced persons.