Strategic patient communication at a Danish hospital

Abstract

Over the past two decades, public organizations have increasingly introduced strategies inspired by private actors to improve communication with targets groups. Patient communication has become a strategic priority at hospitals. Today, hospitals create communication strategies and build departments to improve communication with patients. This includes face-to-face interactions between doctor and patient in clinical settings, as well as a range of practices that permeate the organization as a whole. The institutional attempts to strategize hospital communication have primarily been discussed as an effect of New Public Management within an institutional framework of organizational legitimacy and identity. However, there are few empirical studies of how strategic communication affects collaboration among professional groups within the organization. The empirical focus of this paper is a case referred to as ‘The Perspective of the Patient’: a user-oriented communication strategy developed locally at a Danish public hospital. In this paper, I trace how the strategy is being disseminated. The primary aim is to highlight how strategic communication unfolds as distributed governance. I argue that tensions in the strategy and its implementation are effects of a social constructivist approach to knowledge and reality. On the one hand the strategy sets the stage for different perspectives on organizational reality, and on the other hand the strategy insists on predefining standards. The paper argues that organizational actors must pay attention to the paradoxes that strategic use of a social constructivist approach entails. Prospectively, I suggest including different perspectives and practices as embedded components in developing and disseminating organizational strategies – especially strate- gies of communication.