Overview

Empowered patients create advantages for themselves and communities by monitoring their own needs and reducing loads on overstretched resources. But the patient-consumer can be seen as isolated and overly responsible for choices about their care. This volume reflects on isolation and relationships in health care, including relationships between patients and their peers or families as well as those they have with clinicians. It is developed from selected papers presented at the 9th Global Conference on Making Sense of Health, Illness, and Disease, Oxford (UK), September 2010, representing qualitative and quantitative studies from Europe, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Australia. Contributing authors explore implications of their research for problems related to individualisation and relationships within health care. They reveal situations in which the absence of relational links led to misunderstandings; describe relationships informing peoples' understandings of illness; and present attempts to re-imagine relationships between patients and practitioners.

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9781848881280

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Natalya Godbold is at the Centre for Health Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, where she teaches in the area of Information and Knowledge Management. Her research interests include patient involvement in their care, and human information behaviour, with a focus on contextualised, social sense making. Her PhD investigated how people make sense of kidney failure in online discussion groups, using ethnomethodological perspectives and discourse analysis. Maria Vaccarella is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities and Health, King's College London (UK), where she also teaches for the Comparative Literature programme. She is Joint Leader of the Id.net Hub 'Making Sense of', as well as Project leader of 'Making Sense of Chronicity'. Her main research interests are: the application of narrative medicine to the field of epileptology, the use of graphic pathographies in medical and patient education, and cancer narratives, with a specific focus on the socio-cultural implications of Western breast cancer discourse.

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