in regard to attending personnel. Special strategies of integrated care may be required where multiple health care providers are involved, including horizontal integration (linking similar levels of care, e.g. multiprofessional teams) and vertical integration (linking different levels of care, e.g. primary, secondary and tertiary care). Turn-taking and conversational dominance Researchers have studied the doctor–patient relationship using the theory of conversation analysis. One of the key concepts in conversation analysis is turn-taking. The process of turn-taking between health care professionals and the patients has a profound impact on the relationship between them. In most scenarios, a doctor will walk into the room in which the patient is being held and will ask a variety of questions involving the patient's history, examination, and diagnosis. These are often the foundation of the relationship between the doctor and the patient as this interaction tends to be the first they have together. This can go a long way into impacting the future of the relationship throughout the patient's care. All speech acts between individuals seek to accomplish the same goal, sharing and exchanging information and meeting each participants conversational goals. Research carried out in medical scenarios analyzed 188 situations in which an interruption occurred between a physician and a patient. Of these 188 analyzed situations, research found that the doctor is much more likely (67% of the time, 126 occasions) as compared to the patient (33% of the time, 62 occasions). This shows that physicians are practicing a form of conversational dominance in which they see themselves as far superior to the patient in terms of importance and knowledge and therefore dominate all aspects of the conversation. A question that comes to mind considering this is if interruptions hinder or improve the condition of the patient. Constant interruptions from the patient whilst the doctor is discussing treatment options and diagnoses can be detrimental or lead to less effective efforts in patient treatment. This is extremely important to take note of as it is something that can be addressed in quite a simple manner. This research conducted on doctor–patient interruptions also indicates that males are much more likely to interject out of turn in a conversation than women. Men's social predisposition to interject becomes problematic when it negatively impacts a woman physician's messages to her patients who are men: she may not be able to finish her statements and the patient will not benefit from what