Displacing the patient: the construction of manageable patients in strategic hospital communication

Over the past decade, patient communication has become a strategic priority in Danish public hospitals: communication is a focal point of policies, plans and daily work practices. Hospitals today create communication strategies and build communication departments to improve communication with patients. However, in the existing studies of strategic communication in the hospital sector, the patient’s role in the organizational work has yet to be explored. This paper draws on a major case study of a communication programme entitled 'The Perspective of the Patient', conducted at a public hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark. Based on situational analysis of internal documents, the paper gives an empirical account of the work of strategic documents and explores how the documents organize patient communication through displacements of the patient. This paper shows that the hospital’s patient communication is not only about disease treatment, but also about ‘information treatment’ for the purpose of increasing patient satisfaction at the hospital. The goal of patient satisfaction addresses both a care-oriented approach to the patient and also deploys market perceptions of patients as homogeneous target groups for which information can be standardized. In the latter approach (market orientation), the patient is also a resource for organizational development. Overall, the strategy presents an information-pursuing patient figure that makes it possible to streamline the organization's care orientation on market conditions. Care and market appear to be intertwined in political patient figures through which the hospital is trying to manage the patient as well as to transform itself from within.