Abstract
Although health personnel today have to relate to numerous different patients and patient roles, patients have tended to be viewed as either active or passive. In this paper, we investigate how one unique patient was able to defy advice from his doctors and nurses yet maintain viable relationships with them. We argue that this patient's ability to draw on heterogeneous resources may have made his unusual trajectory possible. On the basis of interviews with relevant health personnel and the concept of sensemaking, we elaborate on how relationships between health personnel and patients emerge from a complex network of ICT, power and third-party actors. We conclude that the active patient is an emergent relationship rather than a singular entity of knowledge and power.
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Notes
Ordinary in their words.
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Acknowledgements
The research work has been conducted at NSEP, the Norwegian Research Centre for Electronic Patient Records. We would like to thank colleagues at the centre for their generous support. We would also like to thank the STH editor, referees and Aslak Steinsbekk for their very useful comments to an earlier version of the article. The Regional Committee for Medical Research Ethics in Central Norway approved the study.
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Heldal, F., Tjora, A. Making sense of patient expertise. Soc Theory Health 7, 1–19 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2008.17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2008.17