Narrating Patienthood: Engaging Diverse Voices on Health, Communication, and the Patient Experience

(Hardback)

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Description

Diversity plays an important role in how people experience illness and healthcare as patients. Listening carefully to stories of how race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and disability can affect patient experience can be revealing and provide much needed change to health communication in the patienthood narrative. This book is a collection of vibrant and engaging essays by scholars of narrative methods in health communication. Each chapter takes readers into the fascinating world of patients who use stories from their personal lives to challenge us to rethink, reimagine, and reformulate what health communication means in practice. Each section of the book focuses on an important aspect of the theory and practice of the patienthood narrative. Part one explores the important ways that telling and sharing patients stories can lead to learning, empowerment, and advocacy. Part two explores several key forms of diversity and how they affect patienthood. Part three illustrates how personal, relational, and cultural aspects of identity intersect to shape the patient experience.

Reviews

This groundbreaking book is an important step tobalancing understanding of keyhealth communication issuesbyvividly presenting the sincerevoices and experiences of health care consumers through first-handpersonal narrative accounts of theirsignificanthealth experiences. This is acritically important bookthat provides direction and evidence for employingthe perspectives of health care consumers to fully understand major communication needs and issues in the delivery of care and promotion of health. It also provideswonderful examples of how to use narrative ethnographic health communication research effectivelyas a rich and revealing method for understanding consumers' experiences of health and health care. -- Gary L. Kreps, George Mason University
Narrating Patienthood invites us to listen with our hearts to understand the harsh realities of borders created through prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and cultural misunderstandings in ways that limit access, marginalize, and silence the voices of people desperately in need of care. Each chapter in this book demands our attention, offering engaging and thought-provoking insights of the ways we communicate through these borders to form communities of care with other patients, providers, and family members and together construct compelling truths of advocacy, empowerment, and change in our health care systems. -- Patricia Geist-Martin, San Diego State University

Author Bio

Peter M. Kellett is associate professor of communication studies at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.