Short Biography

Ortrun Kliche is an applied linguist and translator and does research on encounters in health care using the qualitative method of discourse analysis. 

Since 2009, she has been research assistant at the Institute of History and Ethics of Medicine at Cologne University and lecturer for ethical aspects and communicative skills in the educational project for medical students “PJ-STArT-Block” (key skills training and application in realistic daily routines) as well as for medical terminology. 

In 2015 she finished her PhD (Dr. rer. medic.) on simulated doctor-patient-encounters, a training and assessment method in medical education, focussing on the quality and consistency of simulated patients in repeated role play.

From 2008 until 2011 she was research assistant in the DFG project „Development and Evaluation of an Interpreter Training Module for Bilingual Hospital Employees“ at the Collaborative Research Centre on Multilingualism (Hamburg University), lead by Prof. Dr. Kristin Bührig and Prof. Dr. Bernd Meyer.

In 1991, she graduated from her academic studies at the Faculty of Applied Linguistics in Germersheim (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) with a degree in translation (Italian and French). Since then she has been working in adult education and concept development in national and European projects in the following fields: European exchanges for professionals, (multilingual) communication and interpreter training (based on discourse analysis) in the domains of health and social work (e.g. www.bicom-eu.net).

Her research interests include communication between physicians and patients, especially clear medical communication and physicians’ communication with diverse patients, e.g. in encounters with aged people or with patients who have a limited proficiency of the German and do not share another language spoken by the medical staff. She is focussing on triadic interaction between physician, patient and for example an interpreter or a person appointed to assist the patient (“rechtlicher Betreuer”). She is concentrating on questions regarding supported decision making, how physicians create and check comprehension and what they do when they realise that they cannot proceed in their usual way. Another research focus regards simulation based medical education, i.e. the communicative performance of simulated patients in simulated physician-patient-encounters as well as feedback given by simulated patients.