Situated Standardization and Patient-Centered Care
Situated Standardization and Patient-Centered Care
This chapter explores the consequences of situated standardization for the relation between standardization and patient-centeredness. In the medical sociological literature, ‘standardization’ and ‘patient-centered care’ have been positioned as perfect conceptual opposites. This chapter explore the specificities of this opposition, their limitations, and in which sense a reconceptualization of both concepts could lead to their pragmatic commensurability. Drawing empirically upon the development of patient-centered care pathways, and particularly on the disconcerting moments within empirical instances of biomedicalized and patient-centered care, situated standardization proves helpful for redefining patient-centeredness from a change in professional attitude toward ‘wholeness’, or a procedural focus on patient participation, to a material and organizational characteristic. This proves particularly important because other definitions of patient-centeredness can allow doctors to exert unprecedented power over their patients. By putting center stage the issues patients, care professionals and organizations face, care can be made patient-centered in more substantial, contestable and located ways.
Keywords: Patient-centered care, Standardization, Medical sociology, Disconcertment, Professionalism, Materiality, Organizational patient-centeredness, Issue politics
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