ArticleBMJ open2021
Changing relationships: how does patient involvement transform professional identity? An ethnographic study.
Article in BMJ open, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Letting patients lead? Practitioners' experiences of using DIALOG+ in psychosis outpatient care - patient involvement, collaborative dynamics, and professional roles.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- From Fringe to Core: Speaking Out About Our Evolving Role as Patient Partners in the PARTENAIRES Interprofessional Education Programme.The clinical teacher · 2025Article
- Overcoming barriers to implementation of patient engagement in clinical trials: feasibility testing of an embedded study.Research involvement and engagement · 2025Article
- A study on the professional identity intervention of Chinese new nurses by Balint groups from the perspective of ABC theory of emotion-hong.BMC nursing · 2025Article
- Series: Public engagement with research. Part 3: Sharing power and building trust through partnering with communities in primary care research.The European journal of general practice · 2024Article
- Learning to teach with patients and caregivers: a focused ethnography.BMC medical education · 2024Article
- Evaluating patient participation in value-based healthcare: Current state and lessons learned.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2024Article
- Transforming respiratory diseases management: a CMO-based hospital pharmaceutical care model.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2024Article
- Refugee and migrants' involvement in participatory spaces in a US practice-based research network study: Responding to unanticipated priorities.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2023Article
- The Ecology of Engagement: Fostering cooperative efforts in health with patients and communities.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2022Review
- Factors influencing the professional identity of nursing interns: a cross-sectional study.BMC nursing · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesTo understand identity tensions experienced by health professionals when patient partners join a quality improvement committee.
designQualitative ethnographic study based on participatory observation.
settingAn interdisciplinary quality improvement committee of a Canadian urban academic family medicine clinic with little previous experience in patient partnership.
participantsTwo patient partners, seven health professionals (two family physicians, two residents, one pharmacist, one nurse clinician and one nurse practitioner) and three members of the administrative team. DATA COLLECTION: Data collection included compiled participatory observations, logbook notes and semi-structured interviews, collected between the summer of 2017 to the summer of 2019. DATA ANALYSIS: Ghadiri's identity threats theoretical framework was used to analyse qualitative material and to develop conceptualising categories, using QDA Miner software (V.5.0).
resultsAll professionals with a clinical care role and patient partners (n=9) accepted to participate in the ethnographic study and semi-structured interviews (RR=100%). Transforming the 'caregiver-patient' relationship into a 'colleague-colleague' relationship generated identity upheavals among professionals. Identity tensions included competing ideals of the 'good professional', challenges to the impermeability of the patient and professional categories, the interweaving of symbols associated with one or the other of these identities, and the inner balance between the roles of caregiver and colleague.
conclusionThis research provides a new perspective on understanding how working in partnership with patients transform health professionals' identity. When they are called to work with patients outside of a simple therapeutic relationship, health professionals may feel tensions between their identity as caregivers and their identity as colleague. This allows us to better understand some underlying tensions elicited by the arrival of different patient engagement initiatives (eg, professionals' resistance to working with patients, patients' status and remuneration, professionals' concerns toward patient 'representativeness'). Partnership with patients imply the construction of a new relational framework, flexible and dynamic, that takes into account this coexistence of identities.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.