Sociolinguists know about health – it is what you lose when you have no equal access to accurate information and meaning in healthcare. Meanwhile, requests for action in healthcare are meaningless or even hazardous to the addressee unless implemented properly.  They are also significant for ensuring clear communication, facilitating interventions of health literacy, delivering quality healthcare services throughout our life-long health journey, yet responsible for inducing indeterminacy between requests (for action) and references (of information) if presented unclearly or implicitly. Such indeterminacy may cause (a) socio-communicative risks and failures in healthcare (Matthiessen,2013), and (b) linguistic inequity, undermining health literacy that enhances health equity and social justice (Paasche-Orlow et al.,2018), and possibly legitimizes eliteness (Thurlow & Jaworski,2017). 

This compromises the essence of Critical Health Literacy (CHL) in promoting health literacy, health independence and collective social empowerment (Nutbeam,2000; Chinn,2011; Sorensen et al.,2012; Sykes & Wills,2018).  Therefore, during the COVID-19 pandemic citizens could be misled or mis-informed about the severity of the situation, individual protection and collaborative responsibilities. This study examined the “language of requests” in cross-institutional public health communication (online health letters from Hong Kong Government to local hospitals) as a “semiotic system of social context” involving instances of exchange of social meanings according to specific institutional roles, accountabilities and counterparty risks (Halliday, 1978 & 1984).  The sample included ALL communication (10 letters) issued during the 60 days (first wave) since the first locally confirmed case of infection (23/1/2020).

An ideational approach was adopted to “construe each process as a quantum of change in our experience”, where 343 instances of processes (requests and references) were identified and then quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed, drawing upon resources of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen,2014) and Critical Consciousness of structural inequalities (Freire,1973).  Although 11% of the instances displayed indeterminate tendency (8% hidden requests and 3% hidden references) in this critical pre-hospitalization context (disease prevention and health protection), the systemic registerial profiling of requests (Action Orientation), which highlighted unique ideational and lexical elaborations in “requests” and “references”, can contribute to reducing indeterminacy causing linguistic and health inequities, and facilitating CHL significant in containing diseases.