'will you be able to make the call': Complex decision making in emergency care

In this paper, I explore how medical teams do decision making in complex, high-stakes emergency care events. My interest lies in how decisions are interactionally accomplished through talk, embodied action, and material affordances. Building on completed and ongoing work, I discuss how leadership and decision making are negotiated and distributed, and how the boundaries between team members are continually redefined in practice. Turning to prehospital care, I draw on ongoing research on decision making in emergency response and ambulance dispatch. I discuss and reflect on the P.A.T.H.S. framework -Participants, Artefacts, Transition Stages, Historicity, Setting- (Angouri et al., 2024), and its affordances for capturing the dynamic and distributed nature of dispatch decision making. I close the paper with reflections on the impact of sociolinguistic research in emergency care, considering how an interactional understanding of decision making can inform training, policy, and public awareness of how to communicate with emergency teams.