ORIGINAL ARTICLE Experience of group conversations in rehabilitation medicine: methodological approach and pilot study

Abstract The restoring of equilibrium after a traumatic event makes it possible to give a new significance to pa-tients ’ existence, and healthcare professionals simultane-ously find themselves very close to questions of pain and disability. For these reasons, we introduced weekly group meetings of healthcare professionals and patients suffering from vascular, traumatic or neurological accidents, and meetings of professionals only at the Neurocognitive Re-habilitation Day Hospital of the University of Milan Bic-occa. The aim of this paper is to identify possible indicators of changes in patients ’ existence through a conversational analysis, describing the experience at the light of methodological approach and reporting the results of a pilot observational study. The patient meetings began in October 2011 and led to a process of greater closeness and trust that was expressed by means of words, gestures, emotional participation, and non-verbal communication. The pilot considers the evolution of indicators in a sample of 14 patients for a period of 9 months and a timeframe of 3 months. Supportive interventions decreased while ele-ments of sharing progressively increased, leading to pro-gressive increased consciousness of both self and the disease. The group of professionals found that being to-gether allowed them to distinguish performance as the use of their technical skills from understanding the other and his/her experience as part of their own, and not only linked to the disease. The professionals ’ reflections on their ex-periences led to the emergence of two possible ways of looking at a patient: as somebody other than me or some-body other like me