Making sense of patient expertise

Although health personnel today have to relate to numerous different patients and patient roles, patients have tended to be viewed as either active or passive. In this paper, we investigate how one unique patient was able to defy advice from his doctors and nurses yet maintain viable relationships with them. We argue that this patient’s ability to draw on heterogeneous resources may have made his unusual trajectory possible. On the basis of interviews with relevant health personnel and the concept of sensemaking, we elaborate on how relationships between health personnel and patients emerge from a complex network of ICT, power and third-party actors. We conclude that the active patient is an emergent relationship rather than a singular entity of knowledge and power.