Recalling the doctor to action - two requesting formats employed by a nurse for making relevant the doctor's intervention

At the hospital, nurses' telephone calls to doctors mostly revolve around obtaining doctors' intervention in a medical case. To achieve this, nurses need to make the doctor's intervention relevant, by explicitly requesting it or, more indirectly, by reporting a medical problem. Two recorded telephone conversations have been selected for analysis that show a young and newly employed nurse dealing with a medically and inter-professionally difficult situation: reminding a doctor that he has delayed too much his coming to see a patient. By deploying a conversation analytic approach, the article assesses two different practices or resources the nurse uses for negotiating and obtaining the doctor's intervention -- an explicit request and a report of a medical problem1