From the earliest studies of doctor-patient interaction (Byrne & Long, 1976), it has been recognized that treatment recommendations may be expressed in more or less authoritative ways, based on their design and delivery. There are clear differences between I'm going to start you on X and We can give you X to try and Would you like me to give you X? Yet little is known about this variation, its contexts, or its consequences. In this paper, we develop a basic taxonomy of treatment recommendations in primary care as a first step toward a more comprehensive investigation. We take as our point of departure the observation that treatment recommendations such as those above represent not only different formulations but also different social actions. We distinguish five main treatment recommendation actions: pronouncements, suggestions, proposals, offers, and assertions. We ask: what are the main dimensions on which these recommendations vary and to what end? And what sorts of factors shape a clinician's use of one action type over another with respect to recommending a medication in the primary care context?

Trust is important for patients and may be used as an indicator and potential ‘marker’ for how patients evaluate the quality of health care. The review aimed to classify the current evidence base on trust in the patient–provider relationship in order to identify strengths and weaknesses and to point towards areas for future research. Nine electronic databases were searched from 2004 onwards using text and subject heading keywords relating to ‘trust’ and ‘health care’ and ‘relationships’. Abstracts were identified for empirical studies carried out in health-care settings that explicitly examined trust or reported trust-related findings as a secondary outcome. Two review authors assessed the relevance of abstracts and extracted data relating to year published, country of study, clinical speciality, study design and participants. Five hundred and ninety-six abstracts were included. Most reported on patients' trust in providers; were carried out in the USA; collected data in family care or oncology/palliative care settings; used questionnaires and interviews and elicited patients' perspectives. Only one study explicitly set out to examine providers' trust in patients and <5% of included studies reported on providers' trust in patients. Providers' trust in patients remains a neglected area on the trust research agenda. Empirical studies examining the factors that influence providers' trust in patients and how this might affect the quality of care and patient health-related behaviours are urgently needed to readdress this imbalance. Further exploration of this area using observational methods is recommended.

This article presents a contemporary view on the state of the art of applied conversation analytic studies of medical consultations. I begin by considering why conversation analysts might have been drawn to studying the medical consultation in the first place and how our foundational studies have paved the way to where we are now. I argue that we have provided evidence for a wide range of practical problems and dilemmas faced by patients and doctors (and their solutions) during these encounters; contributed new evidence to sociological debates/critiques of medical dominance; taken up consumer reformist agendas; and begun to demonstrate the practical enactment (or not) of health policies and new health-care technologies “in the wild.” The review highlights a trajectory toward intervention studies in response to increased “outside” interest from the medical community. I argue that although our current observation base may already have the potential to improve patient care, making a difference will require going beyond description to provide different levels of evidence for different stakeholder audiences. Data are in American and British English.

There is little evidence on how professionals communicate to assess suicide risk. This study analysed how professionals interview patients about suicidal ideation in clinical practice. Three hundred nineteen video-recorded outpatient visits in U.K. secondary mental health care were screened. 83 exchanges about suicidal ideation were identified in 77 visits. A convenience sample of 6 cases in 46 primary care visits was also analysed. Depressive symptoms were assessed. Questions and responses were qualitatively analysed using conversation analysis. χ 2 tested whether questions were influenced by severity of depression or influenced patients’ responses. A gateway closed question was always asked inviting a yes/no response. 75% of questions were negatively phrased, communicating an expectation of no suicidal ideation, e.g., “No thoughts of harming yourself?”. 25% were positively phrased, communicating an expectation of suicidal ideation, e.g., “Do you feel life is not worth living?”. Comparing these two question types, patients were significantly more likely to say they were not suicidal when the question was negatively phrased but were not more likely to say they were suicidal when positively phrased (χ 2 = 7.2, df = 1, p = 0.016). 25% patients responded with a narrative rather than a yes/no, conveying ambivalence. Here, psychiatrists tended to pursue a yes/no response. When the patient responded no to the gateway question, the psychiatrist moved on to the next topic. A similar pattern was identified in primary care. Psychiatrists tend to ask patients to confirm they are not suicidal using negative questions. Negatively phrased questions bias patients’ responses towards reporting no suicidal ideation.

This paper focuses on a recurrent practice observed in UK primary care data – how physicians use pre-recommendations: action sequences that when initiated post-diagnosis are recognisably preliminary to the drug treatment recommendations that they contingently project. Data are drawn from recorded primary care consultations collected in England. Pre-recommendations consist of physician requests for information about prior medicines such as, What’ve you tried taking? or Have you taken anything so far? Patient responses subsequently shape the first part of the base treatment recommendation pair. These preliminaries can help physicians manage potential obstacles to patient acceptance: by avoiding prescribing something a patient is already taking, or has tried and found to be ineffective, and by accommodating concerns such as side effects or practical barriers to acceptance. Pre-recommendations are a strategy for convincing/persuading whilst allowing physicians to avoid making an ill-fitted recommendation that might be resisted or rejected as unwanted or unnecessary.