Featured speaker: Szczepan Cofta (Poznań University of Medical Sciences, Poland)

Szczepan Cofta is a Professor at Poznań University of Medical Sciences. He is currently the head of the Department of Respiratory Medicine, Allergology and Pulmonary Oncology. As an expert and researcher, he conducts research on sleep-breathing disorders, adult cystic fibrosis and chronic respiratory failure. He is also a member of many prestigious medical associations. From 2020 to 2023, he served as the head of a special state-run hospital established for the intensive care of severe Covid-19 patients. This experience was described in the book Our Temporary Hospital.
Challenges in the management of chronically ill patients, with particular emphasis
on pulmonary conditions
Providing a diagnosis and treatment, including care, for patients in the advanced stages of chronic disorders seems to be an important challenge for contemporary management in all healthcare systems.
on pulmonary conditions
The specific mission that concerns medical professionals is to achieve three aims:
- healing the sick person or at least attempting to effectively influence the evolution of the disease;
- weakening the painful symptoms that accompany it, especially in the advanced phase;
- providing care to the sick person while addressing all their human expectations.
The facts are as follows:
- large medical capabilities of fairly efficient medical care systems in countries with efficient medical care;
- experiencing significant progress in the context of providing relief from suffering;
- a shortage of care options.
The challenge is to find a balance between the three pillars of medical treatment: therapy, providing relief from suffering and care. Undertaking treatment and care is an expression of the most important human values.
Lars-Christer Hydén (Linköping University, Sweden)

Lars-Christer Hydén is Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the Center for Dementia Research (CEDER) at the University of Linkoping (Sweden) and also Visiting Professor at the Nordland University (Norway). His research focuses on language and social interaction, and the use of narrative and storytelling, in dementia. Under Professor Lars-Christer’s direction, CEDER is currently engaged in social scientific and humanistic research around agency, personhood and everyday life in dementia. Ongoing since 2011, this work is funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Professor Lars-Christer is Advisory Board Member at The Centre for Narrative Research, University of East London, and a member of the research group around the ESCR founded program ”Neighbourhoods and Dementia Research Project”, at Manchester University, UK. He has published extensively in international journals and has edited a number of books about narrative research, including The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (2013), What is Narrative Research? (2014) and Living with Late-Stage Dementia. Communication, Support, and Interaction (2024).
Social interaction and communication involving people living with dementia
Everyday interaction between people is based on social norms but also on each participant having access to certain cognitive and linguistic skills. People living with dementia have access to fewer skills in engaging with other people due to the deterioration of cognitive and linguistic functions caused by the disorder. Thus, social interaction will be challenged as both the participants living with dementia as well as other participants face interactional and communicative troubles that need to be solved jointly. Social interaction and communication become increasingly dependent on the cognitively healthy participants who must organize interaction in such a way that the participants living with dementia can participate with their remaining abilities (often referred to as scaffolding). Over time the person living with dementia will have access to increasingly fewer cognitive and linguistic skills. This makes it necessary to reorganize interaction and communication as the importance of spoken language for communication diminishes. Instead, interaction and communication will become increasingly body-centered. Embodied guiding, staging, and intercorporeal interaction will eventually become central practices in making it possible for people living with advanced dementia to be recognized as collaborative participants in their everyday life.
Jessica Nina Lester (Indiana University, Bloomington, USA)

Jessica Nina Lester is a Professor of Qualitative Methodology in the Qualitative & Quantitative Methodology Program in the School of Education at Indiana University Bloomington. Having been trained in cultural studies and qualitative research methodology, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to much of her work, including both the methodological and substantive foci in her research programme. Regarding methodological work, she publishes in areas related to critical approaches to qualitative method/ology, with a particular focus on discourse and conversation analysis methods, digital tools/spaces in qualitative research, and disability in critical qualitative inquiry. Most recently, she co-authored the book, Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World (Sage, 2022), and co-edited the volume, Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021).
Reflective interventionist conversation analysis:
Connecting research and practice in clinician – patient interactional studies
In this talk, I introduce Reflective Interventionist Conversation Analysis (RICA) as a methodological approach designed to prioritise participatory and collaborative practices across all phases of research focused on clinician – patient interactions. RICA moves beyond traditional approaches to conversation analysis by foregrounding a reflective, interventionist ethos that actively involves research participants — not just as knowledgeable participants but as co-producers of knowledge. This co-production spans the entire research process, from study conception to analysis and dissemination, enhancing the practical relevance of research outcomes. To illustrate the potential of RICA, I present findings from two distinct studies conducted in paediatric medical contexts in the United States. These studies demonstrate how clinician participants participated in shaping research priorities, interpreting conversational data and contextualizing findings to meet the needs of their practice-based environments. Through foregrounding participant expertise, RICA-informed studies not only draw out actionable insights but also ensure that findings are relevant to clinical practice and patient experience. Broadly, then, in this talk I argue for engaging in an analysis of clinician – patient interactions that centres a commitment to aligning research outcomes with local needs. Connecting research and practice in clinician – patient interactional studies
Alison Pilnick (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

Alison Pilnick is a Professor of Language, Health and Society at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests lie primarily in the field of the sociology of health and illness, with a particular interest in interactions between health and social care professionals and their patients or clients. She has worked with a wide range of health professionals in a wide range of care settings both in the UK and overseas, using audio and video recordings to examine interactions and to inform and develop communication skills training. This is linked to a broader interest in the use of qualitative methods to inform and improve healthcare policy and practice.
Understanding the ‘failure’ of patient-centred care
Patient-centred care (PCC) is typically framed as a means to guard against the problem of medical paternalism, exemplified in historical attitudes of ‘doctor knows best’. In this sense PCC is often regarded as a moral imperative. However, systematic reviews of the adoption of PCC in healthcare settings do not find any consistent improvement in health behaviours or outcomes as a result. Rather than raising more fundamental questions about the approach, these findings are generally interpreted as pointing to the need for more or ‘better’ staff training. As a result, empirical research is often focused on the extent to which practice does or does not live up to checklists of PCC criteria, though these checklists are many and varied, and can produce conflicting results.
Patient autonomy is generally foregrounded in conceptualisations of PCC, to be actualised through the exercising of choice and control. But examining healthcare interaction in practice using conversation analysis shows that when professionals attempt to enact these underpinnings, it often results in the sidelining of medical expertise that patients want or need. Drawing on a large corpus of audio and video recorded healthcare interactions collected over 25 years from a wide range of practice settings, I will argue that in rightly problematising unbridled medical authority, PCC has inadvertently also problematised medical expertise. The end result is that patients can feel abandoned to make decisions they feel unqualified to make, or even that care standards may not be met. Understanding this helps to explain why PCC has not produced the hoped-for improvement in health outcomes. It also shows the importance of analyses of healthcare interaction for healthcare policy. The broad moral principles of a values-based approach may be attractive to policy makers but may also create intractable interactional dilemmas for practitioners who have to talk these policies into being.