Advising without personalising: how a helpline may satisfy callers without giving medical advice beyond its remit. Issue 5 (18th April 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Antaki, Charles; Bloch, Steven
• Is Part Of: Sociology of health & illness. Volume 42:Issue 5(2020)
• Page Start: 1202
• Page End: 1219
• Publication Date: 2020-04-18
• Subjects: Parkinson's disease -- telephone helplines -- advice -- conversation analysis -- specialist nurse; Social medicine -- Periodicals; 301.5
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.13088
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0141-9889

Abstract

Abstract: Callers to telephone helplines often seek advice beyond the authorisation of those staffing the service. On health helplines, this poses a problem to the call‐taker. How do they manage the dilemma between, on the one hand, exceeding their competence and authority to give medical advice, and, on the other, leaving the caller unsatisfied with the service? We offer a framework in which to set newly identified practices along with those identified in previous studies. Using a set of calls to a medical helpline run by Parkinson's United Kingdom, we show that the call‐taker manages the problem by (i) only suggesting courses of action highly marked for impersonality or contingency (displaying a 'low deontic stance', Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012), and (ii) limiting the interactional risks of tailoring the advice to callers' personal circumstances. We show how our suggested framework of 'advising without personalising' may guide research into the difficult job of delivering advice where the service provider must observe a limit on what they can say.