Professional communication of doctors in wartime: A trauma-informed approach

Aim: To identify discourse markers of a trauma-informed communicative model in professional medical dialogue.

Materials and Methods: The empirical basis consisted of a collection of «doctor-patient» dialogues recorded between 2022 and 2025. Two samples of doctor speech were formed: in dialogues with patients being internally displaced persons (IDPs) (n=36) and with patients residing in rural regions (n=48). Content analysis was performed using the Textanz software. The study employed a set of general scientific and linguistic methods, including bibliosemantic analysis, content analysis, psychosomatic and comparative analyses, as well as discourse analysis of communicative strategies and descriptive statistics.

Results: A total of 7770 statistically significant lexical units were recorded. In interactions with internally displaced persons, doctors demonstrated a higher frequency of the pronoun «you» (49.11% vs. 44.42%) and a lower proportion of the pronoun «we» (5.20%). The category «Communication and its components» dominated among verbs (33.63% vs. 30.48%). In interactions with patients from rural regions, a higher frequency of the pronoun «we» and a more even distribution of verb categories were observed, indicating a partnership model of communication; in working with IDPs, a patient-centered approach with an emphasis on individualization predominates, whereas in interactions with patients from rural regions, a shared decision-making model prevails.

Conclusions: Medical communication under martial law generates a spectrum of trauma-sensitive professional discourses. The identified discourse markers can be integrated into medical university curricula and clinical communication protocols.