Technological solutions to problems of knowledge and practice in health care are routinely advocated. This paper explores the ways that new systems of practice are being deployed as intermediaries in interactions between clinicians and their patients. Central to this analysis is the apparent...

In this paper, we draw on the analytic perspectives of ethnomethodology to explore doctor-patient encounters in an experimental trial of a complex intervention: an efficacy randomised controlled trial (RCT) of decision-support tools in the UK. We show how the experimental context in which these...

Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is endemic in Western societies, and while a good deal of attention has been paid to the lay experience of such pain, much less sociological attention has been paid to the way in which medical ideas about it have been formulated. This paper takes the latter course,...

Telecommunications systems seem to offer health care providers, professionals and patients a plethora of opportunities to respond to social and geographical inequalities in health care provision, and a new field of health care endeavor has emerged -- 'telemedicine'. This paper presents results...

New telecommunications technologies promise to profoundly change the spatial and temporal relationship between health professional and patient. This paper reports results from an ethnographic study of the introduction of a videophone or 'telemedicine' system intended to facilitate faster and...

This paper explores the relationship between palliative medicine and the wider medical world. It draws on data from a focus group study in which doctors from a range of specialties talked about developing palliative care for patients with heart failure. In outlining views of the organisation of...

Health technology assessment (HTA) is one of the major research enterprises of late modernity, reaching into fields of previously autonomous professional practice, and critically interrogating the organisation and delivery of health care. The 'evaluation' of new health technologies within the...

'Modernization' is a key health policy objective in the UK. It extends across a range of public service delivery and organizational contexts, and also means there are radical changes in perspective on professional behaviour and practice. New information and communications technologies have been...

An innovation is almost never a thing-in-itself. To be sure, there is often what looks like a thing – a newly invented or modified way of thinking or acting, or an artifact, or a system – that is identified in everyday talk as something new. In healthcare, as in almost every other area of...