Displaying limited availability for an upcoming recruitment in nurses’ corridor interactions with hospital coworkers

Abstract

In hospital corridors, nursing staff often call on to coworkers and enlist them for the realization of some practical activity, as part of their teamwork. Sometimes, the coparticipants produce a summons-answer (SA) sequence as a preliminary to the recruiting move, for instance the request. They thus check and display the summoned party’s availability for interaction, for talk, and for a new activity foretold by the summons. In this article, we show that they may also convey, through the SA sequence, some understanding of this activity’s nature and specificities. In this regard, we present practices that the summoned party deploys when enacting limited availability for the upcoming recruitment by continuing their current involvement, merely suspending it instead of abandoning it, and in some cases also displaying being disrupted. The data are video-recordings of nursing staff corridor interactions with coworkers in a hospital outpatient clinic in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. (Multimodal conversation analysis, summons-answer sequence, availability, recruitment, nurse, hospital corridor interaction)