Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 09:00 - 10:30
ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS
hospices or hospitals, traditional storytelling can offer a 'way in' to researching the impact of emotions at work, by
providing some distance from 'real life' and also a structure with which to then address very personal 'real life' tales.
Medicine, Health and Illness 2
ROUNDTABLE 11, CONFERENCE HALL, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
Information as a Regulatory Device: The Politics of Data in the Post-Reform NHS
Speed, E., Pettinger, L., Goffey, A.
(University of Essex)
The 2012 Health and Social Care Act demanded fundamental changes to the organisation of the NHS. The reforms
lauded an 'information revolution', where the use and utility of information, including 'big data' will enable better local
and national provision/commissioning, and more effective levels of health observation and surveillance, using
population metrics. The ubiquity of rhetoric of the positive power of information in the post-reform NHS sits
uncomfortably alongside a clear political and organizational failure to elaborate how these processes are actually
going to work.
In this paper we consider the onerous and complex demands for information recording, analysis and reporting,
focusing on two features of these expectations. First, how can the demands for routine information recording be put
into place in a setting where - because of the 'any qualified provider' regulations of the HSCA, care providers are
simultaneously collaborators and competitors. Second, what effects do these information-reporting requirements have
on professional practice, standing and experiences of work. We contend that the apparent neutrality of information as
a regulatory device is politically important to securing radical institutional change to such a sacred institution as the
NHS, but assigns significant power to private sector service providers and healthcare software companies in so doing.
‘What was Your Blood Sugar Reading This Morning?’: Diabetes Self-management and Biological Citizenship
on Facebook
Hunt, D., Koteyko, N.
(Queen Mary University of London)
Social networking sites (SNSs) have become a salient venue for the consumption and production of neoliberal health
discourse by individuals and organisations. These platforms offer both opportunities for individuals to accrue
networked coping resources and a means for organisations to promote their agendas within a growing 'digital patient
experience economy' (Lupton, 2014).
Focusing specifically on diabetes and drawing on methods of critical and multisemiotic discourse analysis, this paper
examines the interactional styles and multimodal representation of diabetes on three organisational pages on
Facebook and the digital affordances these organisations employ as they publish content online. Popular diabetes
pages utilise the opportunities for social interaction afforded by Facebook's architecture and combine risk
management information with promotional content designed to foster communication between organisations and their
audiences. By foregrounding online participation and reflexive management of health risks, these pages open a new
frontier of 'biological citizenship' (Rose and Novas, 2004) in which users interweave personal interactions on SNSs
with responsible self-care, consumption of health information and health activism. By contrasting content from
commercial, non-profit and government health organisations, we note the role of Facebook in allowing organisations
to derive value from biological citizenship and facilitating wider policy changes to the nature of healthcare delivery.
Lupton, D. 2014. The commodification of patient opinion: the digital patient experience economy in the age of big data.
Sociology of Health & Illness. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12109.
Rose, N. and Novas, C. 2004. Biological Citizenship. In: Ong A and Collier SJ (eds) Global Assemblages. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, pp. 439-463.
237 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University