Our Publishing in Healthcare Communication

Equinox publishes a growing list of books and and two journals devoted to communication in health care contexts.  These include empirically grounded studies drawing on the latest research in applied linguistics and professional communication  as well as material that deals with the challenges of delivering spiritual care or practical social care in medical and crisis contexts or which offer ethical reflection on the key life and death decisions and typical scenarios that are encountered by everyone performing professional roles in healthcare contexts. In contemporary western societies, the conditions of decision making in medical contexts are rapidly changing with the foregrounding of division of professional labour and distributed expertise against the backdrop of a client-centred ideology that legitimises shared decision-making. Increasingly, in health and social care settings, key decisions concerning clients are arrived at in team meetings, which have consequences both for the decisional processes and outcomes. Healthcare delivery is also increasingly becoming multicultural and multilingual in character. This global reality manifests itself as communicative challenges across the care delivery chain. Our growing list in this area represents different traditions of discourse and communication research in its commitment to an understanding of psychosocial, cultural and ethical aspects of health and social care in contemporary societies.