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Background: Nurse practitioners are increasingly conducting consultations with patients on the same basis as medical doctors. However little is known about communication within nurse practitioner consultations. Research on communication in nurse practitioner consultations has identified nurse practitioners communicate with patients in a hybrid style, combining biomedical information with the discussion of subjective information from everyday life. Research has not fully explained why this hybrid style occurs in nurse practitioner consultations, nor determined its links to consultation duration, patient expectations, satisfaction, and enablement. This study was developed to address these gaps in research of communication in nurse practitioner consultations.

Aim: This study aims to advance understanding of the discrete nature of the communication processes and social interactions occurring in the nurse practitioner consultation, including explicating the reasons for the occurrence of the particular communication processes and interaction styles observed in those consultations.

Methods: The study was conducted in a nurse-led primary care clinic providing general practice care. Within a case study research approach mixed methods were utilised, combining structured analysis of video recorded observations of nurse practitioner consultations, questionnaire-based measures of patient expectations, satisfaction, and enablement, and interviews with some of the participants of the consultations. The sample for video recording comprised three nurse practitioners employed at the clinic, and 30 patients registered at the clinic. Questionnaire responses …