Account sequences in emergency care discourse: Comparing conversations with simulated patients and manikins in training sessions

Effective communication between healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients is a key factor in medicine. This is particularly the case in emergency care. This article looks at how HCPs provide accounts of medical procedures to patients in emergency care scenarios, using video data of four training sessions, two conducted with simulated patients and two with a manikin. A comparison between these two types of simulation shows how HCPs give accounts in both modalities, which will eventually inform what modality to use for training HCPs with different learning aims. The practices of HCPs' giving accounts to a patient in emergency care training in the UK were analysed, using a corpus-driven discourse analysis. From the analysis, separate account sequences are identified: (1) HCPs' proposal of medical procedures to a patient; (2) HCPs' accounting of the procedure to a patient; and (3) acceptance or rejection by a patient. HCPs' accounting practices were observed in both cases but used less in the scenario with a manikin.