Intra- and interprofessional health communication

Focus
The network focuses on linguistic and communicative aspects of professional interactions in healthcare. It is concerned with workplace interactions and discussions that occur between professionals within a professional group (e.g. care transfers, case discussions, interdisciplinary treatment planning, referral letters) or between different professions (between nurses and doctors, between different therapeutic professions, in patient documentation, between administrative and medical staff, etc.).

We understand communication to have various multimodal and multilingual manifestations, taking into account the current digitalization in the health care sector and the communicative demands this entails.

The network deals with topics such as digitalization of treatment and documentation, modified communicative demands due to new job profiles, multilingualism, inter- and transdisciplinary expert-to-expert communication, and specialized language as well as public and in-house medical, health, and healthcare sector communication.

Network members
The network provides an exchange forum across institutions and language borders for  linguists in Switzerland. It also serves as a trans- and interdisciplinary platform that is open to researchers from related fields (e.g. social work, medicine, psychology). An explicit objective of the network is to bring together various research questions, data, and methodological approaches.

Network coordinators
Prof. Dr. Ulla Kleinberger (Zurich University of Applied Sciences/University of Zurich)
Dr. Johanna Miecznikowski (USI Università della Svizzera italiana)
Dr. Ina Pick (University of Basel)