Background
TCM
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is in relatively high demand in Hong Kong [In considering a patient’s health and recovery from illness, the medical staff, procedures and services, along with the ingredients and substances used for treatment, are important but not the only factors. For instance, part of the reason that people in mainland China and Hong Kong seek TCM treatments might be that traditional medicine can be strongly associative with one’s own culture and identity [In research on the TCM context, the communication between TCM practitioners and their patients has been shown to be generally favourable. For example, Wang argued that TCM practitioners can provide more interpersonal support than their conventional biomedical counterparts because of superior communication skills [Many studies have stressed the importance of analysing the discourses and communicative praxis in various clinical and medical settings [Despite these studies showing the clinical effectiveness and benefits of integrating TCM and conventional medicine, there is a paucity of research into the communicative and discursive elements involved, especially in communities where TCM is popular like Hong Kong [There is a growing research evidence that TCM practitioners provides more interpersonal support to patients than conventional medicine because TCM practitioners perhaps acquire better communication skills and communicate better with patients [To the best of our knowledge, studies comparing patients’ perceptions of TCM and conventional medicine in China and the U.S. suggested that TCM practitioners had better communication skills than their WM counterparts [By reviewing the literature on healthcare in Hong Kong, analysing the Hospital Authority risk analysis reports and recent media coverage on hospital crises, in addition to undertaking a pilot project in a major public hospital for the Hospital Authority, we believe that effective health communication is critically important to Hong Kong and that far-reaching research should be undertaken to produce a well-informed communication framework for education and professional development, especially for TCM practitioners. In most English-speaking countries or contexts where English is being used in clinical setting, established communication protocol such as the Calgary-Cambridge Guides has been adopted for teaching clinicians about ways to communicate with patients [To address this gap, a few scholars have modified certain communication frameworks like the SEGUE (set the stage, elicit information, give information, understand the patient’s perspective and end the encounter) framework [Communication training sessions are often limited in Chinese contexts as medical schools, clinics and hospitals rarely address the importance of sociocultural factors in medical communication. As the result, clinicians are merely trained to communicate direct medical information instead of addressing patients’ emotional needs [The hypothesis is that TCM practitioners who discuss their conventional medical history with patients will perform better in terms of their clinical communication skills and quality of interactions, resulting in better patient outcomes such as increased levels of patient satisfaction and treatment adherence. In relation to this hypothesis, the study analyses effective communicative practices between TCM practitioners and their patients to determine ways to integrate their conventional medical history into diagnosis and treatment. The analysis of these conversations supports the development of an integrative model for aiding TCM practitioners to make treatment decisions for their patients who also receive conventional medical care.The analysis of the data collected from TCM practitioners who have undergone communication training addresses the following research questions. (1) What knowledge is gained, changed, or lost in the flow of information during TCM medical consultations when patients provide medical information from their conventional medicine doctors? (2) How do TCM practitioners prompt patients to articulate relevant information when accounting for the patients’ perspectives on their conventional medical encounters? (3) What strategies do TCM practitioners use during consultation to understand the patients’ perspectives on their conventional-based medical experiences. The details of the intervention and data collection are elaborated in the next section.