ABSTRACT
This chapter reports a study that examined the nature of doctor-patient communication in one of the emergency departments (EDs) in Hong Kong. It summarises the complexity of communication in the trilingual context of clinical communication in Hong Kong and the language evidences on how patients are involved in a shared decision-making process in their ED visit. The team conducted 28 interviews with key ED clinicians, audio-recorded 10 patient ED journeys from triage to disposition and distributed 58 questionnaires which were completed by all the ED doctors, nurses, and allied health workers. A thematic analysis was used to identify the recurring factors regarding the communication practices from clinicians’ perspective, and they formed the basis to explore the linguistic evidence of the shared patient decision-making processes and the communication challenges in trilingual interactions.
