Resuscitation procedures as multi-party dialogue

Successful out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) resuscitation relies upon effective team communication, which is evaluated as an aspect of non-technical skills. However, this communication has been largely neglected from a dialogue perspective. We propose addressing this issue by examining the structure of OHCA interaction and its characteristic dialogue features. We explore how speakers verbally signal and align their current states, and the possible trade-off between directness and politeness. Preliminary data suggests frequent use of Assertions in OHCA communication, as in other medical interactions, but that OHCA situations also involve distinctively high proportions of Action-directives. Current states are mostly signalled using explicit State-awareness utterances. Directives’ force is also mitigated by politeness features. We discuss how these findings advance our aim of understanding effective team communication in the OHCA context, and how future work might identify associations between linguistic behaviours and resuscitation outcomes.