Nurse Practitioner/Patient Communication Styles in Clinical Practice

Nurse practitioners (NPs) spend more than two thirds of patient-encounter clinical time in intrapersonal communication. The NP literature has little on NP/patient communication styles. The purpose of this study was to examine and document the most common verbal communication style used by NPs in patient interactions. Content analysis was used to analyze 53 NP/patient transcripts for communication style. Based on the transcript analysis, only a minority of NPs used a patient-centered communication style.