Ostermann2026a
| Ostermann2026a | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INBOOK |
| Key | Ostermann2026a |
| Author(s) | Ana Cristina Ostermann, Paola Konrad, José R. Goldim |
| Title | Communicating Death in Intensive Care: The Impact of Longitudinal Family Interactions on Breaking the News |
| Editor(s) | Dariusz Galasinki, Justyna Ziólkowska |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Medical EMCA, ICU, Bad News, Death and Dying, Death, Longitudinal CA, Interactional history |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury |
| Year | 2026 |
| Language | English |
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| Pages | 133-165 |
| URL | Link |
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| Edition | 1ed |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Bloomsbury Handbook of Language and Death |
| Chapter | Chapter 7 |
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some hospitals had to quickly transition to telephone calls for interactions with patients’ families. This shift included, among other changes, the delivery of death notifications over the phone—a type of news previously communicated exclusively in person. This chapter reports on a study that arose within that scenario. Drawing on a corpus of 528 calls recorded by the doctors themselves between 2020 and 2021 in a hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in Brazil, it investigates how the communication of death to families of patients occurs over the phone. We rely on Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson 1974; Sacks 1992) from an interactional history perspective (Beach et al.2018; Deppermann et al. 2021; Wagner et al. 2018) to examine how action, sequential, and longitudinal analysis of naturally occurring interactions illuminate our understanding of death communication. While we find empirical support for some of the claims in the previous literature, this methodological approach provides new insights into the different shapes of death communication. This was only possible through our unprecedented access to longitudinal, real-time interactional data during patient hospitalization. Since this type of data has not yet been explored in previous research or considered in guidelines regarding death communication in medical settings, we hope that the insights from this study reach the training of healthcare professionals, especially in understanding social interaction—not through intuition or theoretical cognitive models that cannot be warranted (Deppermann, Pekarek Doehler 2021)—but instead grounded in analytical insights that only real-time, recorded interactions can offer.
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