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‘It’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: How healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care

This article draws from sociological and socio-legal studies of dispute between patients and doctors to examine how healthcare professionals made sense of patients’ complaints about healthcare. We analyse 41 discursive interviews with professional healthcare staff working in eight different English...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Adams, Mary, Maben, Jill, Robert, Glenn
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6168740/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28830300
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363459317724853
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author Adams, Mary
Maben, Jill
Robert, Glenn
author_facet Adams, Mary
Maben, Jill
Robert, Glenn
author_sort Adams, Mary
collection PubMed
description This article draws from sociological and socio-legal studies of dispute between patients and doctors to examine how healthcare professionals made sense of patients’ complaints about healthcare. We analyse 41 discursive interviews with professional healthcare staff working in eight different English National Health Service settings to explore how they made sense of events of complaint and of patients’ (including families’) motives for complaining. We find that for our interviewees, events of patients’ complaining about care were perceived as a breach in fundamental relationships involving patients’ trust or patients’ recognition of their work efforts. We find that interviewees rationalised patients’ motives for complaining in ways that marginalised the content of their concerns. Complaints were most often discussed as coming from patients who were inexpert, distressed or advantage-seeking; accordingly, care professionals hearing their concerns about care positioned themselves as informed decision-makers, empathic listeners or service gate-keepers. We find differences in our interviewees’ rationalisation of patients’ complaining about care to be related to local service contingences rather than to fixed professional differences. We note that it was rare for interviewees to describe complaints raised by patients as grounds for improving the quality of care. Our findings indicate that recent health policy directives promoting a view of complaints as learning opportunities from critical patient/consumers must account for sociological factors that inform both how the agency of patients is envisaged and how professionalism exercised contemporary healthcare work.
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spelling pubmed-61687402018-10-15 ‘It’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: How healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care Adams, Mary Maben, Jill Robert, Glenn Health (London) Articles This article draws from sociological and socio-legal studies of dispute between patients and doctors to examine how healthcare professionals made sense of patients’ complaints about healthcare. We analyse 41 discursive interviews with professional healthcare staff working in eight different English National Health Service settings to explore how they made sense of events of complaint and of patients’ (including families’) motives for complaining. We find that for our interviewees, events of patients’ complaining about care were perceived as a breach in fundamental relationships involving patients’ trust or patients’ recognition of their work efforts. We find that interviewees rationalised patients’ motives for complaining in ways that marginalised the content of their concerns. Complaints were most often discussed as coming from patients who were inexpert, distressed or advantage-seeking; accordingly, care professionals hearing their concerns about care positioned themselves as informed decision-makers, empathic listeners or service gate-keepers. We find differences in our interviewees’ rationalisation of patients’ complaining about care to be related to local service contingences rather than to fixed professional differences. We note that it was rare for interviewees to describe complaints raised by patients as grounds for improving the quality of care. Our findings indicate that recent health policy directives promoting a view of complaints as learning opportunities from critical patient/consumers must account for sociological factors that inform both how the agency of patients is envisaged and how professionalism exercised contemporary healthcare work. SAGE Publications 2017-08-22 2018-11 /pmc/articles/PMC6168740/ /pubmed/28830300 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363459317724853 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
Adams, Mary
Maben, Jill
Robert, Glenn
‘It’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: How healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care
title ‘It’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: How healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care
title_full ‘It’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: How healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care
title_fullStr ‘It’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: How healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care
title_full_unstemmed ‘It’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: How healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care
title_short ‘It’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: How healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care
title_sort ‘it’s sometimes hard to tell what patients are playing at’: how healthcare professionals make sense of why patients and families complain about care
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6168740/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28830300
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1363459317724853
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