‘Doing questioning’ in the Emergency Department (ED)

Collins, Luke and Gablasova, Dana and Pill, John (2023) ‘Doing questioning’ in the Emergency Department (ED). Health Communication, 38 (12). pp. 2721-2729. ISSN 1532-7027

Abstract

Eliciting information from patients is fundamental to medical professionals' capacity to deliver good healthcare outcomes in Emergency Departments (EDs). There are different kinds of utterances that "do questioning", and health professionals can variously attend to the medical agenda and the interpersonal aspects of their interactions with those attending the ED in the way that they construct these utterances. We investigate a corpus of ED interactions to determine the prevalence and range of utterances produced by doctors and directed at patients that "do questioning." We developed a questioning utterance typology, informed by previous research on the formulation of such utterances and extended according to observations of our data. We subsequently manually coded 4,355 questioning utterances and report the variety of forms that such utterances can take, considering how these are distributed across doctors at different levels of seniority. We found that doctors at different seniority levels favored similar questioning utterance types and the most frequently used appeared to restrict the contributions of patients. We conclude that our extended typology of questioning utterances has value for understanding the ways in which doctors may encourage patients to provide more extensive responses.