Contextualising 'Communication' Skills/Knowledge in Healthcare Research and Training

Date: 15 April 2011
Time: 4:30 - 6:00pm
Venue: Exhibition Area, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Sassoon Road

Contextualising 'Communication' Skills/Knowledge in Healthcare Research and Training by Srikant Sarangi (Director, Health Communication Research Centre, Cardiff University; Professor in Language and Communication, Cardiff University; Honorary Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, The University of Hong Kong)

Abstract:
 Poster My starting point for this talk is a simple, albeit contentious, one – that communication is more than a skill; it is an activity embedded in knowledge, expertise, or more broadly, professional practice. Rather than pathologise communication as is prevalent in the current climate of medical/healthcare education, I offer a holistic and organic perspective by (re)specifying communication as activity/discourse. Such a shift in perspective immediately brings to light the limitations of role-play-based models of communication teaching and assessment. Supplemented by illustrative case studies, I suggest that a host of variables mediate the healthcare encounter in context-specific ways, necessitating analytic sensitivity and reflexivity grounded in real-life discourse data. An activity view of communication, I argue, broadens the circumference of healthcare research/training in the private and public spheres – in both oral and written modes. In conclusion, I outline the challenges/opportunities surrounding interdisciplinary and interprofessional boundary work, while emphasising the practical relevance/uptake of activity/discourse-based communication research findings.

About the Speaker:
Srikant Sarangi is Professor in Language and Communication and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University, Wales, UK. He is also Honorary Professor at the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, The University of Hong Kong; Professor in Language and Communication at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway; and Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Communication & Medicine.

For further enquiries, please contact Dr Olga Zayts.