Background: In Sweden, registered nurses have a key role in initial patient assessments and prioritization in primary care. This assessment is a complex and demanding process. To meet patient and public needs, insight is needed into nurses’ communication and decision-making during these consultations. Therefore, the aim of this PhD project is to explore clinical reasoning and decision-making in patient-nurse consultations in primary care.

Methods: A prospective multicentre study was designed and data were gathered with a purposive sample of audio recorded observations of real-life communication during 150 patient‒nurse consultations, patient reported health status and stimulated recall interviews with nurses.

Findings: This PhD project will investigate communication and decision-making in 150 nurse-patient consultations with a focus on:

1.Patients’ reason-for-encounter and health problems as assessed by patients’ self-reported health concerns and functional health status (COOP-WONCA).

2.Communication of health concerns and needs as observed with the VR-CoDES (Verona Coding Definitions of Emotional Sequences) using the audio recorded consultations

3.Nurses’ clinical reasoning and decision-making using data gathered with stimulated recall interviews and analysed with a qualitative method for thematic analysis.

This project is presented as an example on how to design and gather data in communication research to investigate nurses’ communication and their exploration of health concerns during nurse-patient consultations in primary care.

Discussion: Results from this research are aimed to support nurses in their assessments, communication and clinical decision-making in primary care. In the long term, this research can contribute to increased knowledge on how the competence of registered nurses can be used and enhanced to make the best use of the primary care resources.