Handling complainable matters in palliative care interactions

Abstract

The article uses conversation analysis to investigate how patients and companions complain in palliative care interactions recorded in a UK palliative care setting, and how healthcare professionals (HCPs) respond. The patients’ and companions’ actions do not overtly state, and rather imply, complainable matters for which the co-present HCPs can be seen as responsible. This implicitness affords the HCPs opportunities to address the patients’ and companions’ conveyed concerns as problems in search of practical solutions – rather than grievances. We thus witness the somewhat paradoxical outcome that complaints mobilise remedial actions, but in the process, the one complaining is not treated as complaining after all. We propose that this is a way in which institutional realities pre-empt the overt articulation of nascent complaints. Our analyses show that this is very much the outcome of the interactional work collaboratively accomplished by patients, companions and HCPs. The interactions are in British English.