Attending to child agency in paediatric palliative care consultations: Adults' use of tag questions directed to the child.

Children's agency in their own lives is increasingly recognised as important, including within paediatric health care. The issue of acknowledging child agency is complex in the context of paediatric palliative care, where children have serious and complex conditions that often impact their ability to verbally communicate with others. This study explores how clinicians and parents/guardians direct talk towards a child patient when they are present in a consultation.

Discussing death: Making end of life implicit or explicit in paediatric palliative care consultations.

Objective: To consider whether and how family members and clinicians discuss end of life during paediatric palliative care consultations.

Methods: Nine naturally occurring paediatric palliative care consultations were video recorded and analysed using conversation analytic methods.

Analysis: Focusing on three consultations in which end of life was treated as a certain outcome, analysis explored ways in which end of life was made either implicit or explicit within these consultations.

Cues to deception in context: response latency/gaps in denials and blame shifting.

Over 40 years of work on lying in psychology and communication has investigated numerous 'cues to deception'- the subtle signals people show when they are lying. One of these cues to deception is 'response latency' or the gap that occurs between questions and the lying response. The current investigation uses the methodology of conversation analysis to re-consider the question of response latency in the context of lying.

Paediatric assessment centres in Great Britain: implications for Australia.

Assessment centres have become a prominent feature of paediatrics in the United Kingdom. Staffed by a developmental paediatrician and a team of medical and paramedical workers they are valuable for the diagnosis and coordination of management of handicapping conditions in childhood. Both local and regional assessment centres should be established.

A simple method for examining post-rotatory nystagmus.

This paper is the report of a preliminary study undertaken to examine how normal five-year-old children respond to spinning with particular reference to post-rotatory nystagmus. A simple method is described.

Continuing education.

Is continuing education really necessary? It is popular at the present time to say that it is. But in fact many professional workers go through their life without participating very much in continuing education and we must therefore suppose that there is a solid, although mainly silent, body of opinion which does not consider it necessary. Let us dissect this subject and find out whether continuing education is really essential and why it is not more popular.