Something is troubling me. I've spent the best part of twenty years with research on professional-patient interaction as a focus of my academic work. I'm very familiar with the professional discourses of contemporary healthcare - they emphasise personal care, continuity, management, choice, quality, engagement, empowerment. These are discourses that run in the background of my work on innovations in health technologies too. There are measures of the quality of interaction, of the degree of continuity in care, and of the extent to which treatment decisions are shared and negotiated.
As my friends and I move into middle age, we find ourselves talking about our experiences of health and healthcare more. These conversations seem to me to be messages from a different planet. They're often about struggling to accomplish complex business in a 10 minute consultation, encountering often uninterested and sometimes rude primary care physicians. They're about long waits and interminable queues. The sense we have is not that we are customers, or patients, but that our primary role is to wait in line. We can easily spend six hours queuing for twenty minutes interaction with a hospital doctor, but we may find that our doctor is completely and obviously indifferent to us. But the real sea change is in the way that people talk about nurses. Nurses - especially in hospitals - are no longer 'angels'. Not at all, they're often spoken of with a bitter hostility that's hard to fathom. Unless you're trying to get basic care for an elderly parent, that is.
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