Speaking out of turn: Implications of partner contributions for patient autonomy during prostate cancer consultations

Objective: This research examines how partners contribute to clinical consultations for people with prostate cancer. It highlights a social practice where a partner responds to talk that addresses a patient.
Methods: A conversation analysis of twenty-eight prostate cancer treatment and diagnostic consultations was carried out using data collected from four clinical sites across England.
Results: The analysis demonstrated that this practice was prosocial and patient enabling. Partners oriented to the patient’s primary rights to take their turn as the selected next speaker, only initiating after a substantial delay from the clinician’s turn-at-talk. Consequently, the partner consistently opened an opportunity space that the patient took to elaborate upon, or collaborate with the partners’ turn as they regularly took up a unified stance resisting the individualised configuration of the encounter.
Conclusion: This research highlights the social and clinical utility of partners during these consultations, as they served as important, yet underutilised interactional and informational resources for clinicians and patients.
Practice implications: This research indicates a need to reconsider the configuration of these consultations and sanction partners as formal participants. Absent of this, partners will continue to have to work to insert their contributions into consultations while resisting the dyadic structure of these interactions.