Confidentiality, Consent and Autonomy in the Physician-Patient Relationship

In the practice of medicine there has long been a conflict between patient management and respect for patient autonomy. In recent years this conflict has taken on a new form as patient management has increasingly been shifted from physicians to insurers, employers, and health care bureaucracies. The consequence has been a diminshment of both physician and patient autonomy and a parallel diminishment of medical record confidentiality. Although the new managers pay lip service to the rights of patients to confidentiality of their records, in fact they advocate very liberal medical records access policies. They argue that a wide range of parties has a need to know the contents of individually identifiable medical records in order to control costs, promote quality of care, and undertake research in the public interest. Broad interpretations of the need to know, however, are at odds with strict interpretations of the right to confidentiality. Strict confidentiality policies require that, with few exceptions, patient consent be obtained whenever a patient's record is used outside the treatment context. The traditional criterion for overriding the consent requirement has been that without the override some harm would directly result. This rule is now challenged by the claim that patients have a duty to make their records available for a wide range of research and public health purposes. The longstanding tension between physician responsibility for patient welfare and respect for patient autonomy is being replaced by a debatable requirement that both physician and patient autonomy be subordinated to the goals of data collection and analysis. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Troubled families and individualised solutions: an institutional discourse analysis of alcohol and drug treatment practices involving affected others

Research shows that members of the families with patients suffering from alcohol and other drug‐related issues (AOD) experience stress and strain. An important question is, what options do AOD treatment have for them when it comes to support? To answer this, we interviewed directors and clinicians from three AOD treatment institutions in Norway. The study revealed that family‐oriented practices are gaining ground as a ‘going concern’. However, the relative position of family‐orientation in the services, is constrained and shaped by three other going concerns related to: (i) discourse on health and illness, emphasising that addiction is an individual medical and psychological phenomenon, rather than a relational one; (ii) discourse on rights and involvement, emphasising the autonomy of the individual patient and their right to define the format of their own treatment; and (iii) discourse on management, emphasising the relationship between cost and benefit, where family‐oriented practices are defined as not being cost‐effective. All three discourses are connected to underpin the weight placed on individualised practices. Thus, the findings point to a paradox: there is a growing focus on the needs of children and affected family members, while the possibility of performing integrated work on families is limited.     

The impact of pay-for-performance on professional boundaries in UK general practice: an ethnographic study

The 2004 new General Medical Services (nGMS) contract exemplifies trends across the public services towards increased definition, measurement and regulation of professional work, with general practice income now largely dependent on the quality of care provided across a range of clinical and organisational indicators known collectively as the 'Quality and Outcomes Framework' (QOF). This paper reports an ethnographically based study of the impact of the new contract and the financial incentives contained within it on professional boundaries in UK general practice. The distribution of clinical and administrative work has changed significantly and there has been a new concentration of authority, with QOF decision making and monitoring being led by an internal QOF team of clinical and managerial staff who make the major practice-level decisions about QOF, monitor progress against targets, and intervene to resolve areas or indicators at risk of missing targets. General practitioners and nurses, however, appear to have accommodated these changes by re-creating long established narratives on professional boundaries and clinical hierarchies. This paper is concerned with the impact of these new arrangements on existing clinical hierarchies.     

Whither managerialism in the Italian National Health Service?

In the last decade, the Italian National Health Service has been characterized by the introduction of managerial concepts and techniques, according to the New Public Management paradigm. Recently, these reforms have been increasingly criticized. This article examines the implementation of managerialism in an attempt to evaluate its overall achievements and shortcomings. Overall, managerialism seems to have made good progress: managerial skills are improving; several management tools have been adapted to health-care and public-sector peculiarities; health-care organizations have adopted a wide range of technical solutions to fit their specific needs. At the same time, managerial innovations have often focused on structures as opposed to processes, on the way the organization looks as opposed to the way it works, on the tools it has as opposed to those it actually needs and uses. We thus suggest that research, training and policy-making should stop focusing on the technical features and theoretical virtues of specific tools and should redirect their emphasis on change management.     

Social construction of the managerialism of needs assessment by health and social care professionals

Managerialism in community care has not only radically changed organisational structures delivering care, but the assessment of health and social care needs, the justifications for the assessments, and the experience of those who require publicly funded services. The present paper describes the social construction of the managerialism of needs assessment by health and social care professionals, and illustrates this through the identification of older people as a particular kind of client. The argument draws on 'third way', modernity and postmodernity thinking to show needs assessment as a socially constructed area of welfare. The empirical work in this study is based on the views of 38 health and social care professionals obtained by semi-structured in-depth interviews and a postal questionnaire. The views of these professionals show that the social construction of needs assessment takes place in managing the matching of eligibility criteria against types of services. The key to this process is the application of the concept of management that places health and social care professionals in roles where they are acting for state, voluntary or private agencies, and not in all contexts working together with older people. The study shows that professionals identify older people into two groups or 'classes', i.e. those having health needs as distinct from those with social care. The techniques used amount to an exercise of power by professionals over older people. Change is necessary to break down the dominance by professionals in the needs assessment process. A broader concept of the 'third way' vision by Giddens (1998) is also required to achieve greater relevance to how health and social care is organised, and how relations between professionals and older people are integrated into the idea and practice of participatory care. Therefore, the emancipatory side of modernity remains a largely unfinished project.     

Postmodern research: no grounding or privilege, just free-floating trouble making

Postmodernism has been criticized as failing to offer, on the one hand, authoritative explanations for social phenomena that might provide a scientific basis for policy formation or, on the other, the philosophical justification for emancipatory work – its radical scepticism about claims to knowledge leaving its advocates, including many nurses, with little scope to transform oppressive social and political regimes. Various approaches to this important problem have been offered, both philosophical and mediodological. Some critical theorists have rejected certain aspects of postmodernism as dangerous and distracting. Some more accommodating solutions are troubled by unacknowledged inconsistencies. Others embrace post-modernism's unavoidable ambiguity (towards the Enlightenment for instance) with a lighter heart. In this paper I will review some of the criticism of postmodernism and some proposed solutions to these problems. Using recent research into the impact of managerialism on nursing within the UK National Health Service as an example and drawing on deconstructive literary theory, I conclude by accepting a rhetorical agonistics of undecidability. I take postmodernism as a mandate for causing trouble for those groups who are currently having their say and whose version of truth and rationality has achieved domination over others. I do not take postmodernism as a place from which to champion the cause or privilege the view of any particular group.