Linguistic research on communication regarding the values, wishes, and needs of patients with advanced cancer in the palliative phase is limited, resulting in an inadequate understanding of clinicians' communication. To explore the verbal expressions used by hospital oncology clinicians regarding the VWN of patients with advanced cancer in the palliative phase and to examine the clinician's speech acts and speech act patterns employed during outpatient consultations. A secondary linguistic analysis was performed. Physicians, nurse practitioners and nurses were previously recruited. Content analysis was performed to explore what clinicians expressed verbally about VWN during semi-structured interviews (