Pharmacy as a profession is changing rapidly in the UK. Over recent years, the increased utilization of ready-prepared drugs has led to a decline in the need for the traditional skills of formulation, while computerization has resulted in a situation where much of the routine dispensing work can be undertaken by less qualified personnel. The decline in the traditional aspects of pharmacy has been matched by the emergence of a much greater advisory role. Pharmacy practice researchers have been drawn to support these developments by investigating related areas, but the common factor linking this research is its focus on clinical as opposed to communication issues. Rather than investigating the nature of face-to-face interaction between pharmacists and clients as a topic in itself, researchers instead have been largely concerned with patient/health care system mteractions as a function of drug therapy. Those few studies that have focused exclusively on communication have done so from a quantitative, social psychology framework, thus ignoring the two way, reactive nature of the interaction process. This study, using data collected from patients' and carers' consultations with pharmacists in a hospital paediatric oncology outpatient clinic, uses the sociological methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA) in order to analyze the encounters which take place. In so doing, it aims to shed some light upon what is actually involved in the process of "patient counselling" in this setting. The body of CA literature which considers advice-giving in health care settings provides the starting point for a consideration of the ways in which pharmacists give advice in this setting, and how this is responded to. The aims are thus twofold: to enlarge the methodological resources of PPR, and also to begin an examination of the communicative competencies required of pharmacists in this setting. NB. This ethesis has been created by scanning the typescript original and may contain inaccuracies. In case of difficulty, please refer to the original text.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:514575 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Pilnick, Alison |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/10377/ |
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