Communication in Prehospital and Emergency Care: A State-of-the-Art Literature Review of Conversation-Analytic Research

Abstract

This article is a state-of-the-art review of research published between 2012 and 2022 on language and social interaction in prehospital and in-hospital emergency settings, conducted within the intersecting methodologies of conversation analysis (CA), interactional linguistics, multimodal analysis, and ethnomethodology. A total of 52 studies are discussed, grouped into three interaction types: prehospital care interaction (medical emergency calls, paramedic interaction), in-hospital interactions in the emergency department, and simulated emergency medical care interactions. I synthesize the main topics and major contributions of CA research in prehospital and emergency care, then highlight some lingering questions and knowledge gaps. Finally, I suggest possible areas in which CA can make an applied contribution in the near future, in partnership with the medical field. Data reported in the review are in multiple languages.

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