Narrating Patienthood

Diversity plays an important role in how people experience illness and healthcare as patients. Listening carefully to stories of how race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and disability can affect patient experience can be revealing and provide much needed change to health communication in the patienthood narrative. This book is a collection of vibrant and engaging essays by scholars of narrative methods in health communication. Each chapter takes readers into the fascinating world of patients who use stories from their personal lives to challenge us to rethink, reimagine, and reformulate what health communication means in practice. Each section of the book focuses on an important aspect of the theory and practice of the patienthood narrative. Part one explores the important ways that telling and sharing patient’s stories can lead to learning, empowerment, and advocacy. Part two explores several key forms of diversity and how they affect patienthood. Part three illustrates how personal, relational, and cultural aspects of identity intersect to shape the patient experience.

This volume's 15 chapters provide diverse narratives about patients and their experiences mostly within the US health care delivery system. The field of "patienthood" as identified in the title is organized into three sections devoted to research, practice, and health care encounters. Part 1 contains four chapters that explain personal patient experiences as well as global patient advocacy. Part 2 examines how cultural differences, identities, and disabilities impact health behaviors, health disparities, and health communication. Part 3 details various health communication and patient caregiver encounters, including comparing one individual's varying health care experiences as a patient, a provider, and a family member. Kellett, professor of communication studies at UNC Greensboro, assembles the essays and furnishes a well-organized, contextualizing preface. Each chapter contains references, and there is a helpful index at the back. The book is a useful companion to Bo Snyder's The Patient Experience: Helping Physicians Improve Care (2015). This text is a worthwhile addition to collections in pediatric and family practice medicine, health communication, and public health.Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals., This groundbreaking book is an important step to balancing understanding of key health communication issues by vividly presenting the sincere voices and experiences of health care consumers through first-hand personal narrative accounts of their significant health experiences. This is a critically important book that provides direction and evidence for employing the perspectives of health care consumers to fully understand major communication needs and issues in the delivery of care and promotion of health. It also provides wonderful examples of how to use narrative ethnographic health communication research effectively as a rich and revealing method for understanding consumers' experiences of health and health care., Narrating Patienthood invites us to listen with our hearts to understand the harsh realities of borders created through prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and cultural misunderstandings in ways that limit access, marginalize, and silence the voices of people desperately in need of care. Each chapter in this book demands our attention, offering engaging and thought-provoking insights of the ways we communicate through these borders to form communities of care with other patients, providers, and family members and together construct compelling truths of advocacy, empowerment, and change in our health care systems.

Peter M. Kellett is associate professor of communication studies at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.