The digitalized medical services on NHS website: The changing role of ‘patients’

In recent years, a new digitalized system has been introduced by the National Health Service (NHS) in order to offer support and care to UK citizens. In particular, the Transformation Directorate at NHS England aims to drive the digital transformation of the NHS and social care. For instance, thanks to ‘technology-enabled remoter monitoring’ the NHS can deliver care to people in their homes. Starting from this assumption, this work is aimed at showing the significant role of corpus based tools when health services and care are offered to citizens. In particular, the immediate co-text of the nouns denoting the addressees of NHS policy is investigated in order to analyse the discursive strategies enacted by the NHS when people are informed about the new digitalized forms of healthcare communication. The study is based on a corpus based approach along with studies on transitivity processes, which will help to focus on the changing roles of the receivers of these new services. The outcomes confirm the existence of different lexical choice denoting the addressees of the NHS, thus revealing some changes due to the introduction of new digitalized tools of medical communication.