‘I am here again’: Display of patient loyalty in routine chronic visits

attracted abundant work exploring factors that influence patient loyalty. At the risk of oversimplification, patient loyalty can be described as “a deeply held commitment to revisit or re-patronize in using services in the future despite having better options and, hospitals have functional, reliable, and tangible aspects of services that have potential to cause switching behaviour” (Ravichandran, 2015, p. 213). Existing research, however, has focused almost exclusively on determinants of patient loyalty, drawing primarily on interviews and survey data. While this scholarship provides immense insights into the association between patient loyalty, relationship-building, and communication, how loyalty is performed in real-life interactions cannot be fully expounded without describing the actual language use in situ. This study reports research on the display of patient loyalty in two sequential environments: the opening and closing phases of face-to-face medical consultations. Thirty-nine chronic routine visits between gastroenterologists and older adults were collected in a large state-owned hospital in Mainland China. Using conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974), it analyses data extracts in order to show 1) the design features of patient loyalty, 2) how it relates to participants’ understandings of the incumbency in their relationship category (Pomerantz & Mandelbaum, 2005), and 3) how it contributes to what the patient is doing in the sequential context.