Medical English and institutional communication: linguistic accessibility to ethically-sensitive topics in national health systems’ websites – UK vs. USA

The present paper proposal stems from a wider research project currently in progress at the University of Milan, Italy, called “Ideological, ethical and emotional aspects of English medical discourse”, collecting databases of spoken and written English texts to investigate medical communication in health-care and its ethical and ideological implications. The present day debate over ethics in medicine is no longer restricted to specialist expertise: start/end-of-life issues, stem cell research and mental health are just a few of the many medical topics brought to laypeople daily by the mass media, and the interest shown by the public towards medicine and ethics is easily noticeable, for example, in the presence of a dedicated health channel in any major newspaper’s website. Any individual will at some point in life need health care: this alone justifies such an interest. Not only, the higher life expectancy and worsening environmental and lifestyle conditions in developed countries have been increasing the number of different pathologies and of individuals suffering from them , thus chances are unfortunately multiplying to be personally affected by any of these diseases. Access to an efficient health care system then becomes of paramount importance. This specific study focuses on English medical discourse and institutional communication on the Internet. In particular, it will take into account the national health care systems’ websites of the USA and the UK, as conceptually different types of health care systems (mostly privately-funded vs. mostly publicly-funded) among developed English-speaking countries. The research will take the point of view of the user-patient and it will be aimed at establishing: - the degree of general accessibility (user-friendliness) of each website (e.g. choice, quality and quantity of information provided; genres, media and language employed; etc.); - the degree of accessibility of specific medical topics/issues, chosen among the most ethically connotated (e.g. cancer, AIDS, euthanasia, etc.). The analysis, carried out using tools from Semantic Analysis (Halliday 1985), Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995) and Computational Linguistics (Sinclair 1991), will be essentially linguistic in nature, although it might have to consider other aspects of the Internet “multigenre” (Garzone 2007) (e.g. graphics, layout, multimedia resources, etc.) whenever these should prove semantically relevant to institution-patient communication, and thus to the present research. The ultimate hope is for this study to expand to explore other English and non-English-speaking countries’ national health systems’ websites, and possibly contribute to the drawing up of tentative guidelines for user-friendly Internet institutional communication in the medical field. Essential bibliography: - Fairclough Norman (1995), Critical Discourse Analysis, Harlow, Longman. - Halliday, Michael A.K. (1985), An Introduction to Functional Grammar, London/Baltimore, Md., USA, Edward Arnold. - Garzone, Giuliana (2007), “Genres, multimodality and the world wide web: theoretical issues”, in Multimodality in corporate communication : web genres and discursive identity, edd. G. Garzone, G. Poncini & P. Catenaccio, Milano, Franco Angeli, pp. 15-30. - Gotti, Maurizio (2003), Specialized discourse: linguistic features and changing conventions, Bern, Peter Lang. - Sarangi S., Roberts C. (eds.) (1999), Talk, work and institutional order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. - Sinclair, John (1991), Corpus Concordance Collocation, Oxford, Oxford University Press. - World Health Organization (WHO) (2003), “Gender, Health and Ageing”, http://whqlibdoc.who.int/gender/2003/a85586.pdf