Concordance in healthcare by means of the intersubjective negotiation of a joint commitment

Health care compliance has a very important influence on the final outcome of clinical treatment. Accordingly, the fulfilment/failure of compliance is mainly attributed to the patients’ role in doing what clinicians have indicated instead of an agreement negotiation between the patient and the clinician’s treatment objectives. In the paper, we define how the clinical colloquium can be a space of intentional sharing, in which both patients and health professionals can be involved to arrive at mutually agreed goals. Therefore, we introduced the deontic normative of joint commitments and discuss it in terms of clinical concordance. In the last section of the paper, we present various possibilities of an intersubjective negotiation of concordance during a dyadic conversation, which is detectable from a social ethology approach in the observation of bodily-centred signals.