Global transitions in health care

Abstract

The proposed panel aims at bringing together an international group of pragmatics scholars working on health communication, and in particular the issues related to global transitions in health care. In a broader area of workplace communication transitions are typically understood as periods of change and discontinuity in professional life space (e.g. Westerman, 2012: 11). Much has been written about transitions in the workplace, particularly in the contexts of career change, novice-expert experiences, inter-organizational job change, and organizational mergers and acquisitions. In this panel we take a more comprehensive view of transitions by acknowledging that transitions encompass both changes, discontinuities, advancement and development, as well as preservation, continuity, and possibly even stagnation in professional life spaces. The focus of the panel is on transitions brought about by globalization of healthcare, namely spatial and symbolic mobility brought about by various social, historic and economic processes, and the effects of such mobility on healthcare deliveries. The panel participants will investigate transitions that concern various participants of healthcare encounters (i.e. healthcare professionals and patients/ clients), as well as transitions in the modes of provision of healthcare services. A more comprehensive take on transitions will be reflected in the analyses of transitions at three different levels, namely, how the global macro-transitions (e.g. spatial/ geographical mobility of healthcare professionals’ and patients’ population around the globe; global healthcare services delivery across countries and continents) are interrelated with and impact on (as well as are impacted on) by meso-transitions (within specific institutions and communities) and micro-transitions that are manifest at the level of language use (also see Angrouri et al., in press; Marra et al., in press).