Analysing and Evaluating Patient–Practitioner Interaction About Chronic Pain: A Workshop for Pain Rehabilitation Practitioners

The treatment of chronic pain requires patients to participate actively in their encounters with their rehabilitation practitioners. Therefore, constructive patient–practitioner communication is essential. To improve their communication with patients, practitioners may benefit from insight into patterns in their interactions with patients. Therefore, a workshop was developed to (1) raise pain rehabilitation practitioners’ awareness of both, their own and their patients’ interactional concerns and the interactional effects of their discursive strategies and (2) stimulate them to reflect on their communication practices. This chapter describes the workshop’s theoretical foundations and the practicalities of its design. The workshop is based on the Discursive Action Method, a systematic workshop approach that takes a discursive psychology perspective. In this chapter, the steps through which pain rehabilitation practitioners are guided in analysing conversation material from admission interviews and evaluating their communication practices are described. In addition, we explore whether this workshop allows them to become aware of the interactional mechanisms in their talk with patients and whether it stimulates them to reflect on their own communication practices. Two workshops were video-recorded, so that participants’ discussions during the workshop could be analysed. The findings suggest that the workshop helps participants to identify both patients’ and practitioners’ interactional concerns and to recognize discursive strategies for managing those concerns. In addition, the results indicate that the workshop stimulates practitioners to evaluate their talk with patients and supports them in developing ideas on how they can shape their future communication practices.