Fostering interdisciplinary knowledge translation at the interface between healthcare communication and pragmatics

Understood as a process of negotiation and co-construction of meaning, shared or mutual understanding is a core issue in healthcare communication. Reaching a shared understanding is indeed important in all phases of medical communication, from diagnosis to treatment, to patient engagement and adherence. Many studies in the field of healthcare communication tackle this issue by explaining it with reference to the asymmetry of knowledge and social roles that characterises medical encounters perceiving asymmetry as one of the primary causes of frequent suboptimal outcomes of professional-patient interactions. While we are not surprised to see insights regarding the same problems being developed differently in different disciplines, we suggest that many issues regarding healthcare communication would probably be more easily analysed if they were considered from the perspective of pragmatics, i.e. the field of research that studies language in use. In this chapter we address the issue of shared understanding in connection with the problem of asymmetry, reframing it as an issue of “knowledge translation”.