Interactions in healthcare often determine the quality of patient care, effectiveness of medical information relayed and the positivity of patients’ overall healthcare experience. This is amplified when considering non-verbal patients and patients otherwise in need of mediation. As such, it is important to recognize that interactions in healthcare are not limited to human healthcare – rather, they equally pertain to non-human patients’ needs and welfare. Veterinarians are expected to establish expertise, credibility, and trust with both client and pet. Clients juggle multiple roles, acting as laypeople in veterinary matters, but as experts on and interpreters of the pets’ needs. In veterinarian care, these complex communication strategies involve not just the pet owner and the veterinarian but also the pet itself. This triangle has already been recognized in human medical communication studies, but less so in veterinarian studies. Similar to the triadic constellation in pediatric medicine – with the doctor-parent-child patient interaction –, various roles come into play. Discourse in veterinary care consists not only of the veterinarian’s professional assessment and advice, but also of the pet’s state and medical history, which must be accurately interpreted and communicated by the client. Effective communication in this context has shown to increase client satisfaction rates and alleviate psychological stress for both parties in emotionally difficult scenarios, such as end-of-life communication.
This transdisciplinary dissertation aims to bridge veterinarian communication studies and sociolinguistics in order to analyze participant interaction in veterinarian-client-animal settings during consultations, with a focus
on building ‘expert identities’. The project will use relational work analysis, discursive analysis, and previous findings on expertise, credibility, trust, and advice management in medical discourse from human and veterinarian medical research. The data analyzed will be collected through recordings of authentic consultations in small vet clinics, semi-structured interviews, and televised vet documentaries. Aspects on which the research will focus are distribution of discourse, use of relational work, negotiation of roles, advice management, end-of-life communication, conveying the pet’s needs and advocating for appropriate healthcare. This research aims to fill the gap of relational work research in veterinarian linguistics, specifically with a focus on expert identity positioning, management of expert and credibility strategies, creation of trust, and advice management, and will contribute to the field of expert communication in health.