The Role of Language in Eastern and Western Health Communication

Jack Pun is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. As a bilingual speaker of Chinese and English, he is motivated to investigate the effectiveness of health communication, including how it influences patient satisfaction, from a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary perspective. He is especially interested in how effective communication enhances our understanding of the challenges and expectations in healthcare in international hospital settings. Jack is also a founding member of the Institute for Communication in Healthcare (ICH) at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

1. Introduction 2. The methodological approaches and major themes of health communication in Asian contexts 3. Researching doctor-patient interactions in emergency department 4. Researching clinician-to-clinician communication during clinical nurse handovers 5. Researching communication in high-risk clinical settings: The voices of doctors and nurses working in the Intensive Care Unit 6. Researching communication in high-risk clinical settings: Intensive Care Unit (patients’ voices) 7. Researching the teaching of communication practices for medical students 8. Researching communication on end-of-life conversations 9. Researching Traditional Chinese Medicine communication 10. Researching Veterinary Medicine communication 11. Applications from the health communication research 12. Teaching health communication in a Chinese Context: Developing training for clinicians in the Chinese context and ideas for teachers and course designers 13. Conclusion: Closing the gap between research and practice