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Enquiry calls to GP surgeries in the UK: expressions of incomplete service and dissatisfaction in closing sequences

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-12-16, 15:07 authored by Rein Sikveland, Elizabeth Stokoe
This paper examines patients’ calls to three different GP services in the United Kingdom. Using conversation analysis, combined with coding of 447 calls, we studied the role of thank you in closing sequences, focussing on their timing and order in relation to service outcome. We show, first of all, how patients withhold thank you in orientation to an absent summary or specification of service: patients are more likely to initiate thank you if the receptionist volunteers such a summary. Secondly, we show there is variation in how appropriately participants project the termination of calls using thank you. And, finally, while thank you serves a primary role in managing the termination of calls, the timing, order and design of thank you can also display patient (dis)satisfaction. We discuss our findings in terms of service encounters more generally, including implications for larger-scale analysis.

Funding

The research was co-funded by Loughborough University (Higher Education Innovation Fund).

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Discourse Studies

Volume

19

Issue

4

Citation

SIKVELAND, R.O. and STOKOE, E., 2017. Enquiry calls to GP surgeries in the UK: Expressions of incomplete service and dissatisfaction in closing sequences. Discourse Studies, 19 (4), pp. 441-459.

Publisher

Sage / © The Authors

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-12-02

Publication date

2017

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Discourse Studies and the definitive published version is available at http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445617706999

ISSN

1461-4456

Language

  • en

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