Discourse Community Essay

On a Saturday night, a fully conscious and alert 37-year-old man went to a busy hospital with the complaint of abdominal pain; within two hours of his arrival, he was dead. The cause of his death? A fatal reaction to medication that never should have been administered. Medication that was administered due to a miscommunication between nurses and the patient’s doctor. A medical expert who reviewed the case determined that the nurses and physicians had failed the patient, and a costly malpractice case ensued (Latner). Unfortunately, cases like these are not uncommon. Communication breakdown in the medical field is a massive problem, it’s responsible for causing thousands preventable deaths per year in American hospitals alone (Taran). What lies at the root of this breakdown in the medical sphere what can be done to correct it? In many cases, fatalities are a direct result of attending doctors and nurses failing to communicate. However, the structure and atmosphere of the environment in
This hierarchy isn’t inherently a bad thing, after all, there needs to be some form of organization. John Swales is an author who wrote “The Concept of Discourse Community”, which is an essay that aims to clearly conceptualize what a discourse community is and does so by outlining six criteria that must be met in order to identify a group of people as a discourse community. In fact, in his essay, Swales considers hierarchy to be one of the defining characteristics of any discourse community. Swales also claims that within the hierarchy of a discourse community that, “individuals enter as apprentices and leave by death or in other less involuntary ways” (Swales 222). It is common knowledge that the medical discourse community is ruthless and requires a great deal of effort to gain and maintain status and good reputation