Using a Mixed-Methods Needs Analysis to Ensure the Sustainability and Success of English for Nursing Communication Courses: Improving Nurse-Patient Engagement Practices in Globalized Health Care

To better engage with patients, nurses need employ various communication skills, particularly “engagement strategies” that enable them to understand, elicit or empathize with patients’ concerns. Such engagement is essential to delivering good patient-centered care. This paper describes one part of a mixed-methods needs analysis: the aim was to find and analyze illustrative examples of actual nursing communication in English that showed engagement with between nurses and patients within an intercultural/international context in mainland China, where nurses are increasingly needing to interact with patients in English due to globalization. To confirm and concretely illustrate previously established engagement strategies found in the literature, direct observations were made of a nurse’s authentic interactions with a non-Chinese patient, which were then complemented by a post-observation interview. A detailed linguistic analysis of the data yielded a rich qualitative description of how engagement was practiced, along with quantitative data on the typical distribution and variety of communication strategies in everyday nurse-patient interactions. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this paper details how various strategies for different speech functions were used within the different discourse moves of the interactions, and argues for a more central focus on the teaching of these useful engagement strategies and their patterns of use. The pedagogical benefits and clinical implications of this study will be apparent to practitioners of English for specific purposes (ESP) and nurse educators around the world who are involved in teaching nursing communication in English-medium or international contexts.