What is wrong with patient-centred care?
- Location
- Garden Room, Park House (40 Edgbaston Park Road) and via Zoom
- Dates
- Tuesday 25 February 2025 (12:30-13:45)
HSMC is delighted to welcome Professor Alison Pilnick, who will be presenting research from her award-winning 2023 book ‘Reconsidering Patient-Centred Care: between autonomy and abandonment’.
Patient-centred care (PCC) is typically framed as a means to guard against the problem of medical paternalism, exemplified in historical attitudes of ‘doctor knows best’. However, systematic reviews of its adoption in healthcare settings do not find any consistent improvement in health behaviours or outcomes as a result. Rather than raising more fundamental questions about the PCC approach, these findings are generally interpreted as pointing to the need for more or ‘better’ staff training. Drawing on a large corpus of audio and video recorded healthcare interactions collected over 25 years from a wide range of practice settings, Professor Pilnick will argue that in rightly problematizing unbridled medical authority, PCC has inadvertently also problematized medical expertise.
The end result is that patients can feel abandoned to make decisions they feel unqualified to make, or even that care standards may not be met. Understanding this helps to explain why PCC has not produced the hoped-for improvement in health outcomes. It also shows the importance of analyses of healthcare interaction for healthcare policy. The broad moral principles of a values-based approach may be attractive to policy makers but may also create intractable interactional dilemmas for practitioners who have to talk these policies into being.
Alison Pilnick is Professor of Language, Health and Society at Manchester Metropolitan University. She specialises in the use of conversation analysis as a method to explore interactions in healthcare settings, and for over 25 years has worked with health professionals including doctors, pharmacists, midwives, physiotherapists and nurses, across a wide range of health and social care contexts. Her work has been funded by funders including the British Academy, ESRC, NIHR, Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness, Swiss National Science Foundation and the General Research Fund of Hong Kong. Her research aims to produce findings of practical relevance for healthcare practice which are underpinned by high quality social science analysis.
- This event is free and open to staff and students.
- This is a hybrid event. Registration is essential to let us know if you are attending in person or online, to receive the link to Zoom. Therefore, please ensure that you confirm your attendance via the 'Register for this event' link provided.
- Please note this seminar is not being recorded