Teaching intercultural communication skills in healthcare to improve care for culturally and linguistically diverse patients.

Objective: To provide recommendations for adequately training healthcare providers in intercultural communication skills.

Discussion: We discuss three main recommendations concerning intercultural communication skills training. First, we give an overview of the fundamental skills in which healthcare providers should receive training, such as self-awareness and adaptability.

Discursive angles on the relationship in psychotherapy.

Research on the psychotherapy relationship has been dominated by quantitative-statistical paradigms that focus on relationship elements and their (evidence-based) effectiveness regarding the psychotherapy process. In this mini review, we complement this existing line of research with a discursive-interactional view that focuses on how the relationship is between therapists and clients. Our review highlights some of the main studies that use micro-analytic, interactional methods to explore relationship construction of the following elements: Affiliation, cooperation (Alignment), empathy and Disaffiliation-Repair.

First Encounters in Psychotherapy: Relationship-Building and the Pursuit of Institutional Goals.

This article examines how therapists and patients start building and managing relationships and pursue institutional goals at the same time. Based on a corpus of 6 audio-recorded therapies (client-centered therapy and psychodynamic therapy), I investigate first encounters between therapists and patients as the starting points of any therapeutical process and the place where a relationship between the interactants is established for the first time. Following a microlinguistic qualitative approach and applying methods from conversation analysis and discourse analysis, I show how therapists, on the one hand, try to align with patients to build a positive working alliance and, on the other hand, work to fulfill specific interactive tasks of therapeutic discourse which demand disaligning with the patients' communicative activity and their interactive expectations.