Establishing joint attention in remote talks with the elderly about health: a study of nurses’ conversation with elderly persons in teleconsultations

This study is a contribution to the sparsely studied field of nurses’ teleconsultations with frail elderly people. The aim was to describe how talk and interaction are accomplished and by what means problems are handled that emerge from the fact that the communication is conducted via videoconferencing techniques. Recordings were made of 22 sessions of teleconsultation between nurses and elderly nursing home residents aided by enrolled nurses. The data were analysed with a qualitative method inspired by conversation and discourse analysis. The findings indicate that in order to create a joint attention the participants often had to verbally confirm and reconfirm that contact had been established. The triad of participants played a special part in maintaining the joint attention through compensating for the contextual aspect of the medium's limitations and the demented elderly person's communication problems. ‘Talks about the communication’ and passages of social talk took place when the nurse or the staff member wanted to re‐establish and maintain joint attention. The joint attention seemed connected to a special sort of eye contact and gaze and to the type of camera projection that was used. One conclusion was that to create joint attention in nurses’ teleconsultations with frail elderly people, the limitations in transferring communication cues and the limitations of what the camera can reveal of the general context could, to some extent, be made up for by verbal communication within the triad of participants. Another conclusion was that these limitations in the context of interaction in some situations also seemed to be an advantage for the demented elderly and contributed to increased attention.