Examples Of Discourse Community

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Paper 2 – Rough Draft Over the intercom you hear “Code Blue, 2nd floor, room 117.” You hear doctors’ pagers ringing and see a herd of staff rushing into a patient’s room. The hospital is a hectic place with many on-edge people. In medical facilities, it is common to use codes as a means to announce a situation to the medical staff without alarming the patients or visitors. Therefore, those working in a medical facility must understand the codes and procedures used by the facility; this is an example of a discourse community. Each medical facility has a set of rules and standards to follow and it is important that each and every staff member takes the time to memorize and become accustomed to these codes because someone’s life could be at …show more content…

A discourse community is a textual system with stated and unstated conventions, a vital history, mechanisms for wielding power, institutional hierarchies, vested interests, and so on.” The medical community has a public set of goals to improve the wellbeing of man and to improve the treatment of health conditions, as well as a common interest and knowledge of the human body. There are a number of journal, and books published within the medical community in order to exchange ideas and communicate over a number of forums and discussions. In the medical discourse community, the specialized terminology is always changing, furthering the requirement of training prior to entering the field. A person cannot enter the medical discourse community without any knowledge at …show more content…

Each of these subdivisions require different means of knowing and communicating. Nurses may only be expected to know a small amount of information on a wide variety of diagnoses, while a doctor may be expected to know a far larger amount of information on an even wider scale. There are also certain expectations for communicating among and within these subdivisions. Means of communicating within the nursing community is often far different than that of doctors and even so, communication between doctors and nurses. Though these means of communication may differ between subdivisions of the medical community, it is essential that all members are aware of the proper means of communication, as well have enough knowledge about the topic at hand to correctly interpret the information received. With a patient’s life at risk, insufficient means of communication, or a total lack of communication, could lead to further complications, or the ultimate failure -