Communication without dialogue? Framing patient-professional interaction in UK institutional discourse on pregnancy loss

UK medical discourse on pregnancy loss underrepresents communicative interaction and overrepresents unidirectional professional speech acts, positioning patients mainly as recipients of authorised information.

• Why it matters: Communication failures are linked to harmful experiences in pregnancy care, but institutional texts shaping expectations of care have been little studied for how they represent communication itself.
• What they did: Using Wmatrix7, the study analyzed two UK corpora—seven medical organisations (120,383 words) and eight charities (224,481 words)—split into healthcare professional-facing and patient-facing sub-corpora, then ran frequency, semantic keyness, keyword, and concordance analyses.
• The result: Medical outputs foreground clinical evidence, policy, risk, and professional knowledge, with passive or agentless forms like “confirmed,” “advised,” “recommended,” and “offered,” while charity texts more often depict bidirectional talking, listening, feelings, preferences, and patient knowledge.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.