ArticleSociology of health & illness2014
'Why must I wait?' The performance of legitimacy in a hospital emergency department.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 74 citations in OpenAlex.
- Discretionary Compromises: How Clinicians Navigate Competing Values in Cardiovascular Patient Prioritisation.Sociology of health & illness · 2026Article
- The Work Undertaken by Patients and Their Families Whilst in the Emergency Department.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2026Article
- Article
- Bugbears in the Waiting Room: Revisiting Arber and Sawyer's Classic Study of GP Reception Work Using Ethnography in Eight English General Practices.Sociology of health & illness · 2025Article
- Article
- Legitimacy as Social Infrastructure: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of the Literature on Legitimacy in Health and Technology.JMIR human factors · 2025Review
- The development and validation of a conceptual definition of avoidable transitions from long-term care to the emergency department: A mixed methods study.Health science reports · 2024Article
- The costs of care: An ethnography of care work in residential homes for older people.Sociology of health & illness · 2023Article
- Communicating decisions about care with patients and companions in emergency department consultations.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2022Article
- Impacts of racism on First Nations patients' emergency care: results of a thematic analysis of healthcare provider interviews in Alberta, Canada.BMC health services research · 2022Article
- Psychiatrization in mental health care: The emergency department.Frontiers in sociology · 2022Article
- Factors to improve quality for older patients in the emergency department: a qualitative study of patient trajectory.BMC health services research · 2021Article
- Triage as an infrastructure of care: The intimate work of redistributing medical care in nursing homes.Sociology of health & illness · 2021Article
- Theorising health professionals' prevention and management practices with children and young people experiencing self-harm: a qualitative hospital-based case study.Sociology of health & illness · 2021Article
- Expanding boundaries in psychiatry: uncertainty in the context of diagnosis-seeking and negotiation.Sociology of health & illness · 2020Article
- Personal information and public health: Design tensions in sharing and monitoring wellbeing in pregnancy.International journal of human-computer studies · 2020Article
- Keeping out and getting in: reframing emergency department gatekeeping as structural competence.Sociology of health & illness · 2017Article
- Wasting the doctor's time? A video-elicitation interview study with patients in primary care.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2017Article
- Institutions of care, moral proximity and demoralisation: The case of the emergency department.Social theory & health : STH · 2016Article
- The social practice of rescue: the safety implications of acute illness trajectories and patient categorisation in medical and maternity settings.Sociology of health & illness · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
This article examines the processes of negotiation that occur between patients and medical staff over accessing emergency medical resources. The field extracts are drawn from an ethnographic study of a UK emergency department (ED) in a large, inner city teaching hospital. The article focuses on the triage system for patient prioritisation as the first point of access to the ED. The processes of categorising patients for priority of treatment and care provide staff with the opportunities to maintain control over what defines the ED as a service, as types of work and as particular kinds of patients. Patients and relatives are implicated in this categorical work in the course of interactions with staff as they provide reasons and justifications for their attendance. Their success in legitimising their claim to treatment depends upon self-presentation and identity work that (re)produces individual responsibility as a dominant moral order. The extent to which people attending the ED can successfully perform as legitimate is shown to contribute to their placement into positive or negative staff-constituted patient categories, thus shaping their access to the resources of emergency medicine and their experience of care.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.