Allan McDougall
Current Appointments
Research Associate, CERI
Doctoral Student, Health & Rehabilitation Sciences, Western University
Doctoral Fellow, HCTP, University of Toronto
E-mail: allan.mcdougall@schulich.uwo.ca
Twitter: @allanmcdougall
Educational Background
MA, University of Waterlo, Rhetoric & Communication Design (Co-Op)
Research Program Highlights
- How do experiences and expectations of health care team members impact outcomes?
- Which technologies mediate and influence the interactions of health care teams?
- What are the key genres that play a role in the communication and coordination of care for advanced heart failure?
Publications from Google Scholar
Personal Biography
Part of the underlying mandate at CERI is to develop a community of researchers who bring unique perspectives to health professional education research. By virtue of his years in the field, his experiences at the Centre, and his personal interest in workplace communication, Allan’s work exemplifies this mandate. His work is the product of his training in the fields of rhetoric, linguistics, literature, and writing studies. Growing up, Allan admired his father’s interest in researching professionalism, leadership, and employee development as he managed large groups of employees in the Alberta architectural hardware industry. The mutual interest he shared with his father about the challenges of communicating effectively, combined with Allan’s interest in the rise of online communication as a (not so) typical ‘Gen Y’er’, placed him on a path to scholarship in rhetoric and professional communication.
During his MA in Rhetoric & Communication Design at the University of Waterloo, Allan worked as a copywriter for a company that specialized in improving the internal communications of large retailers. He spent hours working on effectively transmitting policies and mission statements from corporate administration to employees. When he brought that workplace communication expertise to medical education research, he immediately saw the utility of using the nuances of rhetoric to explore the complex speech acts of medical genres and institutional communiqués.
His doctoral work in Health Professions Education and his training in communication research have positioned him to expand his research program to study the educational implications of communication on and between complex healthcare teams, including institutional bodies and patients. To that end, Allan has played a role in the Centre’s professional communication research related to transplantation teams, chronic cardiac care, and medical team learning.
As a scholar of rhetoric, Allan’s position is that policy-makers, practitioners, patients and their families all play a critical role on healthcare teams. In an environment that is as simultaneously bureaucratic and intimate as medicine, a rhetorical perspective allows researchers to see communication as both imperfect and mutable. Allan’s clarifying work attempts to identify the tacit assumptions that can become embedded in patterns of clinical communication. In the years to come, he hopes his work will help medical professionals, administrators, and the public understand how to shape their communication methods to suit the needs of their audience.
