Abstract

Miscommunication during end of shift hand-offs between hospital nurses has been implicated as a source of errors in patient care, yet little research evaluates the structure of language during communication in an attempt to understand potential communication errors. Although the functions and meaning of hand-offs for nurses has previously been examined, there is little information about the current state of the structure and language of hand-offs. This research begins to fill that gap in by using genre analysis of transcripts of 43 end-of-shift hand-offs between nurses at four hospitals in the Midwestern United States.

Two analytic techniques common in linguistics research were carried out: a move analysis to determine the structure of the hand-offs, and corpus analysis to identify the lexical and grammatical features used by nurses during hand-offs. In addition, two methods used for hand-offs (audio-taped and face-to-face) were compared.

Description

This dissertation has also been disseminated through the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. Dissertation/thesis number: 3382185; ProQuest document ID: 304935603. The author still retains copyright.

Author Details

Yvonne Barthel Ford, PhD, RN

Sigma Membership

Unknown

Type

Dissertation

Format Type

Text-based Document

Study Design/Type

Observational

Research Approach

Mixed/Multi Method Research

Keywords:

Health Care Management, Interpersonal Communication, Language

Advisor

Richard W. Redman

Second Advisor

Deborah A. Sampson

Third Advisor

Ada Sue Hinshaw

Fourth Advisor

John M. Swales

Degree

PhD

Degree Grantor

University of Michigan

Degree Year

2009

Rights Holder

All rights reserved by the author(s) and/or publisher(s) listed in this item record unless relinquished in whole or part by a rights notation or a Creative Commons License present in this item record.

All permission requests should be directed accordingly and not to the Sigma Repository.

All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.

Review Type

None: Degree-based Submission

Acquisition

Proxy-submission

Date of Issue

2017-12-21

Full Text of Presentation

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