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.