Professional Communication in Healthcare Teams: A Linguistic Audit of Nigerian Teaching Hospitals in the South West

Communication quality within healthcare teams in Nigerian teaching hospitals has significant consequences for patient safety, clinical efficiency, and interdisciplinary professional relationships, yet linguistics-informed audits of healthcare team communication in Nigerian contexts are rare. This study conducts a professional linguistic audit of communication practices in multidisciplinary healthcare teams at two teaching hospitals in Oyo and Ekiti states, focusing on ward round communication, clinical handover, and critical incident reporting. A professional observation protocol was applied across forty-eight team interaction events, supplemented by structured interviews with sixty healthcare professionals including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, and analysis of thirty written clinical handover records. Ward round discourse analysis reveals a hierarchical communication structure dominated by consultant physicians, with nurses and junior doctors frequently constrained to one-word responses and rarely invited to contribute clinical observations or concerns. Clinical handover recordings show significant information loss compared to WHO-recommended handover content standards, with medication information most reliably communicated and patient social context information most frequently omitted. Critical incident reports show high rates of passive voice and nominalization that obscure individual responsibility, a pattern with implications for organizational learning. The audit findings generate twelve professional recommendations organized around communication training, documentation standard reform, and team communication protocol development. Keywords: healthcare team communication, linguistic audit, teaching hospitals, South West Nigeria, patient safety.