MP #3

As John Swales describes it a discourse community is a community that has six defining characteristics.  These are: “a broadly agreed set of common public goals, has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, has acquired some specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.”  Each community will have its own unique set of these characteristics.  I want to explore a discourse community of nurses in a specific family practice doctor’s office.

I’m sure that, like in every doctor’s office, the group of nurses in each all have the same agreed upon common goals.  The common main goal for the nurses in the doctor’s office I observed in was putting patient care first and foremost.  This is their job, and also their passion.  They want to provide the best care possible for their patients.  The nurses try to do this as quickly as they can while being efficient at the same time.  This is how they keep things running smoothly on a daily basis. When going into a doctor’s office, this is the kind of care one would expect to receive.  This is the care nurses must give to keep a good reputation or their office.  The doctors and physician assistants that the nurses work under also expect them to work to their best ability, so that a patient is receiving optimum care from the whole team.  If the best care possible isn’t given a patient’s health could at risk and possibly even their life.

The mechanism for intercommunication used most in the doctor’s office among nurses was the computer.  I would have never thought this would be the case.  Considering the technological advances of today I should have known this would be the mechanism of choice being that the office I chose to observe in is a larger one. Through a computer system is how nurses communicate patient information the quickest.  It’s also how the nurses keep up with their tasks and what has or has not been done.  Not only is this how the nurses effectively communicate, but the whole office uses this system.  This is how they communicate with their other specialty offices and with the hospital.  Another form of intercommunication obviously would be talking to each other.  Sometimes communicating through words rather than the computer makes the message being sent easier to understand.  If a nurse checks the system and doesn’t fully understand a task or what the doctor’s orders are, then going and actually talking to the person who assigned it would help them to better understand.  This is because they could get a more in depth explanation from the person and also be able to ask them questions.

In the office I observed in the participatory methods I talked about in the last paragraph all provide feedback.  The computers provide feedback to everyone including doctor’s nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners and all of the other faculty on patient appointments, what their illness or health problems are, and how they want to treat them.  Talking with each other provides even better feedback.  And the other method I wanted to talk about is having meetings.  All of the nurses come together in this doctor’s office and discuss ways they can improve their services and also if anyone sees any issues amongst each other they can be worked out as a group.  This way they can talk and work things out together and all be on the same page/level with each other.

In the nursing community, I think what would be considered genres are the different levels of degrees.  I observed  ADN’s, BSN’s, and MSN’s.  These differ in the amount of schooling each has.  ADN’s have 2 year associate degrees, this is the lowest level of schooling you have to receive to become a registered nurse.  You would get this degree from a community college or vocational school.  A BSN would be the bachelor’s degree of Science in nursing.  This is a four year degree that you would obtain from a university.  And then there is the Master’s of Science in nursing.  You would earn this degree at a university after receiving a bachelor’s degree first.  This degree requires two additional years of college after the initial four.  The difference I saw in between each of these is obviously the amount of education they received, their knowledge, and the amount of authority each held.

Every discourse community has its own lexis, or in other words its own special way of communicating.  The first lexis of course would be the terminology used by nurses.  If you were listening to a pair of nurse’s talk about a patient’s condition, you would probably hear some words that you didn’t know the meaning of.  Just for example, if you had no previous knowledge of any part of the medical field you wouldn’t know the myocardial infarction is a fancy word for a heart attack.  You also wouldn’t know what it entailed if someone said that a baby was born with a deformation in their aortic arch.  In the case I heard about, from what I understood it was a little over my head as well, two of the veins connecting into the arch were grown together and needed to be separated for the heart to function properly.  This baby also had a hole in his heart that needed to be repaired as well, otherwise the heart couldn’t function properly and neither would the rest of the body.  There is also medical terminology, which are acronyms used not only by nurses but by the whole medical field.  An example of one of these would be B.I.D. which stands for twice a day or H.S. means before bedtime.  These acronyms make it quicker and easier for orders to be given.

And lastly the discourse community has different levels of members.  There are nurses coming and going all the time due to different reasons, rather it be that they don’t like the office or because they are moving or for any other reason.  You have your newer nurses coming in who are learning the ropes of how things are done in that particular office.  These nurses would be what you call the novices of the discourse community.  And then you have your nurses who have been there for a while and know all of the ropes on how things are done around their office with the other nurses.  They know what works and what doesn’t, so they would considered an expert in the community.

Every discourse community is unique in its own way.  They all have the same general characteristics, but they all vary when you look at the specific characteristics Swales describes discourse community having.  This discourse community of nurses seemed to be a great one, and I can’t wait to be a part of my own in the future.