Take Care! : The Ideal Patient and Self-Governing

Abstract: In this thesis, a phenomenological approach is taken as the purpose is to discuss how the healthcare experiences of Swedish patients with chronic illness are affected by political state reforms and governing technologies. The thesis compares the discourse of Swedish healthcare policy with the discourse of healthcare in practice. Swedish healthcare has gone through major changes during the past decades, which have affected the state-to-patient relationship. This shift involved a transfer of responsibility from the state to its citizens, enabled through patient empowerment. In this change, a new ideal patient-role emerged, which is the patient as an informed and active consumer. What this thesis shows is the existence of a discrepancy between the ideal patient-role in governmental writing and the same ideal patient-role in the reality of the healthcare system. The ethnography consists of a literature study of healthcare policy documents and interviews with ten informants about their experiences of healthcare, in connection with the chronic diseases that affected their lives. The aim has been to examine the governing qualities of healthcare policy and practice, implementing Foucault’s theory of governmentality and technologies of the self.