Changes in community pharmacy communication - Towards emotional awareness at the pharmacy counter.

OBJECTIVE

To explore whether and how community pharmacy staff display an alteration in emotional awareness through interactional behavior during desk meetings after participating in a mentalizing education programme, and thereby to investigate if theoretical learnings, or offline social cognition, can be translated into actual communicative practice, or online social cognition.

METHODS

As part of a larger feasibility study, we developed a methodological framework to categorize interactional contributions in relation to mentalizing communication and emotional awareness. The framework was applied to a total of 50 video recordings of community pharmacy desk interactions from 11 Danish community pharmacies who all participated in the mentalizing education programme. Through this, pharmacy staffs' interactional contributions from 25 video recordings before and 25 video recordings after participation were categorized and descriptively compared.

RESULTS

Pharmacy staff appear to display an altered orientation towards patients post-education; they produce more questions when initiating interactions (first position talk-turns) and more responses to patients' utterances (third position talk-turns). Furthermore, the realizations of third position contributions in post-participation measures display heightened emotional awareness, rendering a greater orientation to patients' perspectives.

CONCLUSION

In post-participation measures pharmacy staff displayed an altered interactional approach to patients. This contributes to research concerning competency training of healthcare professionals and adds weight to the notion that online social cognitive skills can be affected through training of offline social cognitive skills.

INNOVATION

The methodological framework provides a novel and innovative approach to investigating changes in communicative practices. The framework is appropriate for all dialogical healthcare communication research.