Seminar I Patterns of Elicited and Volunteered Information vis-à-vis Caller Types in Medical Emergency Communication

Medical emergency calls are interactionally and thematically organised through question-answer sequences. The callers can be patients themselves, but in most cases the calls are made on behalf of patients, e.g., partners/spouses, children/sibling, professional carers and even strangers. This presentation is premised on the basic assumption that the caller profile is a key variable in how the communication process is mediated, irrespective of the algorithmic script guiding such calls.

The main data corpus consists of 400 calls made to the emergency number (112) concerning breathlessness, directed at two Medical Emergency Services located in the Capital Region and Northern Denmark. For the present paper, I select a representative sample of 60 calls for in-depth comparative analysis: 20 calls where the callers are patients; 20 calls where the callers are spouses/partners contacting from a home setting; and 20 calls where the callers are healthcare professionals contacting the emergency number on behalf of elderly patients resident in nursing homes.

Using theme-oriented activity analysis as the analytical framework, the findings indicate different interactional patterns of elicited and volunteered information at two phases of the call: the problem presentation phase and the detailing of medical condition phase. More specifically, there emerges a kind of gradation of elicitation by the call taker when it involves family members mediating the call – moving from directing questions at the caller to asking the caller to direct questions at the patient to expressing the intention to directly speak with/listen to the patient. This pattern deviates starkly when it involves patients and healthcare professionals as caller-types, given the direct accessibility of symptoms in the case of the former and the abundance of volunteered information in the case of the latter. In essence, during the emergency medical calls, the call taker handles not only ‘factual’ information in an algorithmic, scripted manner against established criteria but also the caller type as part of the emergent communicative contingencies. I suggest that such findings have practical relevance for call handlers and can constitute a core part of in-service communication training packages.