Performing and documenting patient-centred collaboration during meetings

This paper belongs to Thematic Session 3 of the Gothenburg Meeting Science Symposium

Katarina Jacobsson, Lund University (Social Work)

Abstract 
During the last decade the Swedish authorities’ appeal for collaboration between and within different welfare institutions has been particularly accentuated through various efforts to standardize and formalize collaboration and co-ordination. Human service workers from various agencies (eg. psychiatry, the social services, and the employment office) are required to arrange meetings regarding individual clients or patients where they draw up a plan, stating “who do what and when”. In this paper, I examine one such meeting where ten professionals come together with Carl, a young patient at a closed psychiatric unit, in order to plan Carl’s future while they simultaneously fill out the form “Co-ordinated Treatment Plan” (CTP). The CTP-document played a prominent role in the meeting, giving rise to “text-governed interaction” between the meeting participants. The patient-centred meeting was performed in a rather restricted format, in which the patient took on the role of being just another meeting participant, at times quite a peripheral one. The study is part of a larger qualitative research project in which we investigate how document practices are incorporated in everyday work at social service agencies and primary care centres. The material consist of documents, interviews, and field notes generated from shadowing professionals.