Assessment of doctor’s communication skills and professional tact as a genre-forming feature of a review of medical services

In online reviews of medical services, the consumer’s assessment of the doctors’ communication skills and their professional tact is an essential feature of the genre. According to the target audience, this parameter is vital for the overall assessment of the quality of medical service. The empirical base represents the reviews of doctors posted on the websites of specialized online publications and forums. Based on the analysis, positive and negative patients’ assessments of the doctor’s communication skills and professional tact were identified. It has been established that the assessment of the success rate of the communicative interaction with the doctor is one of the essential features of the Internet genre under study, since it reflects the addresser’s intention aimed at the formation of public opinion about the services provided. The study defines the parameters of the medical specialist’s communicative competence according to which the assessment in the review is made. The list includes the ability to communicate the necessary information to the patient in a complete, understandable and delicate form; empathy; tact; compliance with professional ethics; skills in controlling dialogic interaction; tone of communication, etc. Based on the comparison of positive and negative assessments of individual parameters of communicative competence, techniques of effective and riskprone communication between a doctor and a patient were identified, along with their discursive characteristics. The results can serve as a basis for expanding research on professional medical communication based on oral and written sources of patient reflection. 

medical discourse, speech genre, online review, reviews of medical services, medical review, doctor’s communication skills, doctor’s communicative competence