Achieving activity transitions in dental consultations: Managing interprofessional collaboration and patient cooperation during the transition to dental examination

Abstract

This study uses conversation analysis to examine how dentists, nurses, and patients collaboratively accomplish the transition into dental examination. Using video-recorded consultations from a dental clinic in Korea, this study shows that transitions are accomplished either through verbal announcements or tacitly, without them. In transitions involving announcements, dental professionals announce their exam-relevant actions, which elicit the nurse's assistance or the patient's cooperation. Tacit transitions rely primarily on participants' monitoring of one another's embodied actions and use of instruments, without announcements. In both types of transition, participants follow routine steps by drawing on procedural knowledge while managing contingencies through multimodal resources. This study advances our understanding of the triadic nature of dental consultations, multimodal social interaction, and inter-professional collaboration in healthcare.