The Language of Patient Feedback: A Corpus Linguistic Study of Online Health Communication

The Language of Patient Feedback provides a unique insight into a diverse range of issues related to healthcare. Through the comprehensive and detailed interrogation of 29 million words of online patient feedback on the NHS in England, as well as 11 million words of responses to the feedback from NHS providers, this book:

• Uses a combination of computer-assisted and human analysis (Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis) to examine the extent to which characteristics like age and gender result in different types of evaluation.
• Investigates why nurses, doctors, dentists and receptionists are associated with very distinct types of feedback.
• Demonstrates the ways that NHS staff respond to comments and what this reveals about underlying institutional ideologies and practices.
• Concludes with suggestions for key recommendations that the NHS could act upon to improve the overall level of care it provides, as well as reflecting on what patient evaluation can actually tell us.

The Language of Patient Feedback is key reading for anyone undertaking research within corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and health communication.

Paul Baker is Professor of English Language at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, where he is also a member of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS). He has written 16 books and is also commissioning editor of the journal Corpora (EUP).

Gavin Brookes is Senior Research Associate in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. His research interests include corpus linguistics, (critical) discourse studies, multimodality and health communication.

Craig Evans is a student in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, where he is currently working on his PhD studying NHS patient feedback and staff responses using a corpus-based approach to discourse analysis. His interests include discourse and identity, social care and health communication.