Managing requests in nurse-doctor telephone conversations at the hospital

The Thesis is concerned with newly qualified nurses' activities at the hospital: data consists of recorded telephone calls for care coordination between nurses and hospital personnel during 6 months, and related ethnographic observations. Three newly employed qualified nurses volunteered for the study and the research covers their first months on the job.

This research will focus on phone conversations between nurses and doctors, and in particular on the issue of formulating and managing requests by newly employed nurses. Indeed as a hospital's size implies less proximity between personnel, the telephone is in need for relaying and communicating. The sequential composition of the whole conversation emphasizes the need of articulation between different activities and interests (patient's and family, doctor's, nurse's and others), while at the same time pointing to how the interlocutors contribute together to the production and management of the request. By adopting conversation analysis as analytical approach, I will try to understand what talk-in-interaction structures can be identified in telephone requests and how nurses' display of competences is made according to these. On a more sociological level, I plan to closely analyze how nurse-doctor interaction and coordination is built up and managed through the intermediary of telephone conversations.