The patient: citizen, consumer and partner in health governance

This chapter contribute to the unpacking of institutional changes of
the welfare state by examining how the patient is configured as a key political
actor in the Danish healthcare system. By analyzing the configuration
of the patient, we show how the patient is enacted as part of particular
rationalities of governance both at the level of national policymaking and
at the level of a welfare institution; exemplified at a single hospital. As a
discursive figuration, the patient is not exclusively related to the specificity
of the doctor-patient relation - rather, the patient has a much wider remit,
as part of a configuration of the ways in which certain problems of healthcare
organization and management are perceived. The analysis of the ways the patient is inscribed in healthcare problems and solutions point to historically
changing authority relations and intersecting governance ideals
either within concrete organizational contexts or within the healthcare
system and the welfare state writ large.
All together, the analysis tells stories of changing authority relations
between patients, professionals, health care institutions and welfare state
in which health governance discourses display the patient as a flexible
management tool, and hereby a key political actor in the formation of the
Danish welfare landscape.