Day by Day

The research that I’m most interested in is what happens on the other side of the clinician patient relationship. We know a lot about the clinician’s work, and how to handle illnesses that are presented by patients. There are several approaches to meeting the needs of our patients, including ‘participatory medicine’ and ‘patient centric care’. Wagner and colleagues proposed the ‘chronic care model’ in which healthcare professionals, e.g. doctors and nurses, should be prepared and proactive, and patients should be informed and activated so that productive interactions can happen.

It’s not clear when people are patients or consumers or clients or in the centre of care or should be engaged in their care or informed and active or take the lead or follow the doctor’s lead. There are so many roles for the people on both sides of the interaction: leading, following, providing and taking advice, educating, sharing knowledge, intervening, making decisions, rescuing, presenting a problem, solving a problem. Sometimes the roles are interchangeable, sometimes roles are the legal responsibility of the clinician, most of the time it’s about what patients need to solve a health issue, and all the time it’s about helping people.

I call my research ‘The Patient Voice’ because it’s an ambiguous phrase. When we are in a clinical relationship with a doctor or nurse or allied healthcare professional, we typically are considered to be patients. Since an increasing number of people are developing health issues that don’t go away, and diagnosis and treatment require more finetuning than ever before, the nature of being a person who is patient is changing.

Many factors affect what it’s like to be a patient. Sometimes people are consumers of healthcare services. Sometimes they are clients of healthcare professionals. Sometimes they are patients in the traditional sense of getting help and guidance and an intervention from a clinician.

In exploring what this means, I wrote an article in the Pulse+IT Magazine called ‘Hearing the patient’s voice‘.

The next step is to do some research asking questions about what it means for people to access the medical records that clinicians keep about them, how people can use these records, and what it means to interact online with clinicians, and many more questions.