Carey Candrian | University of Colorado Denver (original) (raw)

Papers by Carey Candrian

Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 2015

This empirical investigation addresses four paradigmatically framed research questions to illumin... more This empirical investigation addresses four paradigmatically framed research questions to illuminate the epistemological status of
the field of health communication, systematically addressing the limitations of existing disciplinary introspections. A content analysis
of published health communication research indicated that the millennium marked a new stage of health communication
research with a visible shift onto macro-level communication of health information among nonhealth professionals. The analysis
also revealed the emergence of a paradigm around this particular topic area, with its contributing scholars predominantly sharing
postpositivistic thought traditions and cross-sectional survey-analytic methodologies. More interdisciplinary collaborations and
meta-theoretical assessments are needed to facilitate a continued growth of this evolving paradigm, which may advance health communication
scholars in their search for a disciplinary identity.

While health care at the end of life is changing, the language for talking about treatment option... more While health care at the end of life is changing, the language for talking about treatment options and patient preferences around the end of life
is taking longer to change. This book carefully details the way language shapes decisions around end-of-life care. Using ethnographic research from two sites that offer emergency care and end-of-life care – a hospice and an emergency department – the author illustrates common themes around language use that serve as microcosms of the larger healthcare system in the United States. The sites have different purposes for providing care, yet the themes from both serve as guidance and reflection for other areas of caregiving.
The language used to talk about death holds consequences and opportunities for understanding and making decisions about care practices. This book uses personal stories and perspectives from patients, family members, and medical workers to paint a picture of some of the issues and tensions individuals and caregivers face. With an aging population – one that represents a major public health challenge in the twenty-first century – Carey Candrian argues that examining the care we provide for individuals, especially aging individuals, is fundamental to creating a developed, ethical, and engaged society.

SAGE Research Methods Cases, 2014

Healthcare environments have become increasingly complex, especially around the end of life. As t... more Healthcare environments have become increasingly complex, especially around the end of life. As they become more complex, organizational members are often pulled in competing directions as they manage to bring order to what otherwise would be a disorderly world. This extensive ethnographic study of a hospice and an emergency department (ED) critically analyzes the nature of discourse and its resulting accomplishments. I use the notion of 'taming' to describe the way providers talk about and make sense of their work and work environment, and the consequences it has for their own personal well-being, as well as for care around the end of life. The goal is to elucidate how reclaiming struggle and choice over meaning production is needed for healthcare challenges of the 21st century.

Journal of General Internal Medicine, Aug 2012

BACKGROUND: Mental illness is common and associated with poor outcomes for co-occurring medical i... more BACKGROUND: Mental illness is common and associated with poor outcomes for co-occurring medical illness. Since primary care physicians manage the treatment of complex patients with both mental and medical illnesses, their perspectives on the care of these patients is vital to improving clinical outcomes.OBJECTIVE: To examine physician perceptions of patient, physician and system factors that affect the care of complex patients with mental and medical illness.DESIGN: Inductive, participatory, team-based qualitative analysis of transcripts of in-depth semi-structured interviews.PARTICIPANTS: Fifteen internal medicine physicians from two university primary care clinics and three community health clinics.RESULTS: Participant characteristics were balanced in terms of years in practice, practice site, and gender. Physicians identified contributing factors to the complexity of patient care within the domains of patient, physician and system factors. Physicians identified 1) type of mental illness, 2) acuity of mental illness, and 3) communication styles of individual patients as the principal patient characteristics that affected care. Physicians expressed concern regarding their own lack of medical knowledge, clinical experience, and communication skills in treating mental illness. Further, they discussed tensions between professionalism and emotional responses to patients. Participants expressed great frustration with the healthcare system centered on: 1) lack of mental health resources, 2) fragmentation of care, 3) clinic procedures, and 4) the national healthcare system.CONCLUSIONS: Physicians in this study made a compelling case for increased training in the treatment of mental illness and improvements in the delivery of mental health care. Participants expressed a strong desire for increased integration of care through collaboration between primary care providers and mental health specialists. This approach could improve both comfort in treating mental illness and the delivery of care for complex patients.

Natural Medicine Journal, 2009

Doctor-patient communication can significantly improve many clinical outcomes, including ensuring... more Doctor-patient communication can significantly improve many clinical outcomes, including ensuring diagnostic accuracy, enhancing patient satisfaction, improving compliance, and reducing malpractice cases, which can potentially transform clinical relationships into more collaborative encounters. 1,2 Yet recent studies on participation in clinical interaction show it's not just the amount of communication, but the kind of communication that leads patients to perceive superior quality of care. An interesting set of questions now emerges: What is the relationship between care and communication? How do different models of communication transform care? And how do different models of care transform communication?

An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research (Eds. Salwen & Stacks), 2008

People have studied and discussed communication processes within dominant organizations since ant... more People have studied and discussed communication processes within dominant organizations since antiquity. Because of rapid social and organizational change, however, great pressure has been placed on organizational communication researchers to continually develop useful concepts and studies to match the complex interactions of contemporary workplaces. From the time of its formal introduction in the 1950s, the area of organizational communication has "borrowed" heavily from numerous academic disciplines (e.g., industrial psychology, social psychology, organizational behavior, administrative science, contemporary rhetorical theory, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, political science, and the philosophy of science; . Moreover, scholars from a variety of disciplines conduct research on organizational communication. Consequently, literature abounds on historical, theoretical, and methodological issues. Rather than providing a thorough overview of relevant literature, this chapter instead briefl y discusses selected theoretical/conceptual frameworks and related research perspectives and examples relevant to organizational communication.

Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, 2015

This empirical investigation addresses four paradigmatically framed research questions to illumin... more This empirical investigation addresses four paradigmatically framed research questions to illuminate the epistemological status of
the field of health communication, systematically addressing the limitations of existing disciplinary introspections. A content analysis
of published health communication research indicated that the millennium marked a new stage of health communication
research with a visible shift onto macro-level communication of health information among nonhealth professionals. The analysis
also revealed the emergence of a paradigm around this particular topic area, with its contributing scholars predominantly sharing
postpositivistic thought traditions and cross-sectional survey-analytic methodologies. More interdisciplinary collaborations and
meta-theoretical assessments are needed to facilitate a continued growth of this evolving paradigm, which may advance health communication
scholars in their search for a disciplinary identity.

While health care at the end of life is changing, the language for talking about treatment option... more While health care at the end of life is changing, the language for talking about treatment options and patient preferences around the end of life
is taking longer to change. This book carefully details the way language shapes decisions around end-of-life care. Using ethnographic research from two sites that offer emergency care and end-of-life care – a hospice and an emergency department – the author illustrates common themes around language use that serve as microcosms of the larger healthcare system in the United States. The sites have different purposes for providing care, yet the themes from both serve as guidance and reflection for other areas of caregiving.
The language used to talk about death holds consequences and opportunities for understanding and making decisions about care practices. This book uses personal stories and perspectives from patients, family members, and medical workers to paint a picture of some of the issues and tensions individuals and caregivers face. With an aging population – one that represents a major public health challenge in the twenty-first century – Carey Candrian argues that examining the care we provide for individuals, especially aging individuals, is fundamental to creating a developed, ethical, and engaged society.

SAGE Research Methods Cases, 2014

Healthcare environments have become increasingly complex, especially around the end of life. As t... more Healthcare environments have become increasingly complex, especially around the end of life. As they become more complex, organizational members are often pulled in competing directions as they manage to bring order to what otherwise would be a disorderly world. This extensive ethnographic study of a hospice and an emergency department (ED) critically analyzes the nature of discourse and its resulting accomplishments. I use the notion of 'taming' to describe the way providers talk about and make sense of their work and work environment, and the consequences it has for their own personal well-being, as well as for care around the end of life. The goal is to elucidate how reclaiming struggle and choice over meaning production is needed for healthcare challenges of the 21st century.

Journal of General Internal Medicine, Aug 2012

BACKGROUND: Mental illness is common and associated with poor outcomes for co-occurring medical i... more BACKGROUND: Mental illness is common and associated with poor outcomes for co-occurring medical illness. Since primary care physicians manage the treatment of complex patients with both mental and medical illnesses, their perspectives on the care of these patients is vital to improving clinical outcomes.OBJECTIVE: To examine physician perceptions of patient, physician and system factors that affect the care of complex patients with mental and medical illness.DESIGN: Inductive, participatory, team-based qualitative analysis of transcripts of in-depth semi-structured interviews.PARTICIPANTS: Fifteen internal medicine physicians from two university primary care clinics and three community health clinics.RESULTS: Participant characteristics were balanced in terms of years in practice, practice site, and gender. Physicians identified contributing factors to the complexity of patient care within the domains of patient, physician and system factors. Physicians identified 1) type of mental illness, 2) acuity of mental illness, and 3) communication styles of individual patients as the principal patient characteristics that affected care. Physicians expressed concern regarding their own lack of medical knowledge, clinical experience, and communication skills in treating mental illness. Further, they discussed tensions between professionalism and emotional responses to patients. Participants expressed great frustration with the healthcare system centered on: 1) lack of mental health resources, 2) fragmentation of care, 3) clinic procedures, and 4) the national healthcare system.CONCLUSIONS: Physicians in this study made a compelling case for increased training in the treatment of mental illness and improvements in the delivery of mental health care. Participants expressed a strong desire for increased integration of care through collaboration between primary care providers and mental health specialists. This approach could improve both comfort in treating mental illness and the delivery of care for complex patients.

Natural Medicine Journal, 2009

Doctor-patient communication can significantly improve many clinical outcomes, including ensuring... more Doctor-patient communication can significantly improve many clinical outcomes, including ensuring diagnostic accuracy, enhancing patient satisfaction, improving compliance, and reducing malpractice cases, which can potentially transform clinical relationships into more collaborative encounters. 1,2 Yet recent studies on participation in clinical interaction show it's not just the amount of communication, but the kind of communication that leads patients to perceive superior quality of care. An interesting set of questions now emerges: What is the relationship between care and communication? How do different models of communication transform care? And how do different models of care transform communication?

An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research (Eds. Salwen & Stacks), 2008

People have studied and discussed communication processes within dominant organizations since ant... more People have studied and discussed communication processes within dominant organizations since antiquity. Because of rapid social and organizational change, however, great pressure has been placed on organizational communication researchers to continually develop useful concepts and studies to match the complex interactions of contemporary workplaces. From the time of its formal introduction in the 1950s, the area of organizational communication has "borrowed" heavily from numerous academic disciplines (e.g., industrial psychology, social psychology, organizational behavior, administrative science, contemporary rhetorical theory, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, political science, and the philosophy of science; . Moreover, scholars from a variety of disciplines conduct research on organizational communication. Consequently, literature abounds on historical, theoretical, and methodological issues. Rather than providing a thorough overview of relevant literature, this chapter instead briefl y discusses selected theoretical/conceptual frameworks and related research perspectives and examples relevant to organizational communication.