Understanding How Patient, Caregiver and Healthcare Professional Come Together During Treatment

Abstract

This paper aims at clarifying actors, associations and treatment flow that patient, caregiver and healthcare professional undergo; at identifying shared contexts (“ba”) and their overlap for self-transcendence; at looking at the actors and associations as activity systems to understand the activities and actions executed, and expected to be executed, by the actors (division of labor) to visualize boundaries for transformation. Qualitative data was gathered through open-ended questionnaires distributed to healthcare professionals and caregivers in Japan, Singapore and Brazil. Hermeneutic analysis and interpretation of the answers were conducted to draw findings and implications; data generated from these went through framework method of analysis in three levels: Actor-Network Theory to identify actors, associations and treatment flow; Knowledge-Creation Theory’s shared context; as activity systems to clarify the division of labor. Three actors were found: patient, healthcare professional, and caregiver. The consultation is central to treatment flow as it is when one shared context emerges among actors, assessment is conducted, and tasks are assigned. This is a preliminary study which lays the foundation for our ongoing research, so the implications are targeted at the researchers: necessity to clarify what sort of negotiations and translations usually take and the role of technology in it; identify where and how actors become attuned to focus on where and how self-transcendence happens; understand actions to visualize boundaries for transformation. This is a first attempt to analyze patient-healthcare professional-caregiver relationship combining the Actor-Network Theory, “ba” and Activity Theory’s division of labor.