The Uses and Experiences of Synchronous Communication Technology for Home-Dwelling Older Adults in a Home Care Services Context: Qualitative Systematic Review.

Background: European health care systems regard information and communication technology as a necessity in supporting future health care provision by community home care services to home-dwelling older adults. Communication technology enabling synchronous communication between 2 or more human actors at a distance constitutes a significant component of this ambition, but few reviews have synthesized research relating to this particular type of technology. As evaluations of information and communication technology in health care services favor measurements of effectiveness over the experiences and dynamics of putting these technologies into use, the nuances involved in technology implementation processes are often omitted.

Diagnosing by anticipation: Coordinating patient trajectories within and across social systems.

Anticipation is a fundamental aspect of social life and, following Weber, the hallmark of social action-it means trying to take others' responses to our actions into account when acting. In this article, we propose and argue the relevance of anticipation to the sociological study of diagnosis. To that end, we introduce and elaborate on the concept of diagnosing by anticipation.

Protocol for 'virtual presence': a qualitative study of the cultural dialectic between loneliness and technology.

Introduction: Most research on loneliness comes from the health sciences, statistically seeking to measure the health-related effects of feeling alone or isolated. There is a need to expand on this understanding and explore loneliness as a more complex social phenomenon. In this article, we present a qualitative design for studying the intersection between loneliness, technology and culture.

Rhetorical work and medical authority: Constructing convincing cases in insurance medicine.

This article explores general practitioners' (GPs) persuasive efforts in cases where biomedical evidence is absent but expected. Health insurance in Western countries is based on the biomedical ideal that legitimate complaints should have objective causes detectable by medical examination. For GPs responsible for assessing sickness and incapacity for work, the demand for objective evidence can be problematic: what if they as experts deem that a patient is in fact sick and eligible for benefits, but are unable to provide objective evidence to that fact? How can they convince bureaucrats in the insurance system to accept their judgment? Taking 'medically unexplained symptoms' as my case, I draw on focus group and follow-up interviews with GPs in Norway to explore how GPs attempt to persuade bureaucrats to accept their professional judgment.

Making and managing medical anomalies: Exploring the classification of 'medically unexplained symptoms'.

This article explores the making and management of anomaly in scientific work, taking 'medically unexplained symptoms' (MUS) as its case. MUS is a category used to characterize health conditions that are widely held to be ambiguous, in terms of their nature, causes and treatment. It has been suggested that MUS is a 'wastebasket diagnosis'.

Do nurses rate diseases according to prestige? A survey study.

Aims: To see whether nurses rate diseases according to prestige and, if so, how their ratings compare to the disease prestige hierarchy previously uncovered among physicians.

Design: Cross-sectional survey.

Methods: In 2014, 122 nurses in a continuing education programme for healthcare personnel in Norway rated a sample of 38 diseases according to how prestigious they see these as being among healthcare workers in general.

How general practitioners understand and handle medically unexplained symptoms: a focus group study.

Background: Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are a common yet challenging encounter in primary care. The aim of this study was to explore how general practitioners (GPs) understand and handle MUS.

Methods: Three focus group interviews were conducted with a total of 23 GPs.

Balancing medical accuracy and diagnostic consequences: diagnosing medically unexplained symptoms in primary care.

Focusing on the case of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS), this article explores diagnostic classification in the absence of biomedical evidence or other strong medical warrants for diagnosis. The data are from three focus group interviews with Norwegian general practitioners (GPs) conducted in 2015, that centred on the issue of what diagnoses to use (or not) for MUS. The qualitative analysis reconstructs the logic underlying GPs' diagnostic accounts, which centred on the meaning of diagnostic categories and on anticipating how 'generalised others' would respond to those meanings (called 'diagnosing by anticipation').

Stability and change in disease prestige: A comparative analysis of three surveys spanning a quarter of a century.

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of three survey studies of disease prestige in medical culture. The studies were conducted in 1990, 2002 and 2014 using the same research design. In each of the three rounds, a sample of Norwegian physicians was asked to rate a set of 38 diseases on a scale from 1 to 9 according to the prestige they believed health personnel in general would award them.