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Paper short abstract

Patient expertise is a complex concept that encompasses a wide range of knowledge and skills and varies across different medical fields, healthcare settings and actors involved. My article focuses on the multiple patient expertise and the processes of expertisation of patients in Switzerland.

Paper long abstract

Very little is known on how patient expertise is made in practice and on how it is recognised in certain settings and not in others. If patient and public involvement (PPI) in research and healthcare has gained prominence, there are remaining ambiguities and debates about what kind of expertise is deemed valuable within institutional settings of care, what kind of expert these patients are and who and how we qualify them. Current frameworks often homogenise/standardize patient knowledge as a singular and subjective phenomenon, obscuring its speciality and contextual diversity. Their expertise is frequently flattened into generic “lived experience” and “experential knowledge”. Patient expertise is not monolithic but a constellation of embodied knowledge, technical skills and political labor.

To move beyond the current debate, institutional frameworks and ethical discourse encouraging PPI, my project aims at ethnographically exploring: what forms of patient knowledge gain legitimacy and through what institutional mechanisms? How do cultural, political and medical specialisation contexts shape whose expertise is recognised? How does the institutionalisation and professionalisation of such patient experts reinforce (or not) social inequities? In this paper, I will look at patient expertise as a complex and multiple concept including many knowledge and skills and differences across different medical fields, health settings and actors involved. I wish to deepen our understanding of which aspects of patient knowledge are valued, in which contexts and which collaborations are feasible and imagined in different healthcare settings in Switzerland. I will also highlight the frictions, tensions and negotiations involved in these processes.