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The purpose of this study is to explore how vulnerable healthcare consumers foster social support through visual storytelling in social media in navigating healthcare consumption experiences.

This study employs a dual qualitative approach of visual and textual analysis of 180 Instagram posts from female breast cancer patients and survivors who use the platform to narrate their healthcare consumption experiences.

This study demonstrates how visual storytelling on social media normalises hidden aspects of healthcare consumption experiences through healthcare disclosures (procedural, corporeal, recovery), normalising practices (providing learning resources, cohering the illness experience, problematising mainstream recovery narratives) and enabling digital affordances, which in turn facilitates social support among vulnerable healthcare consumers.

This study highlights the potential for visual storytelling on social media to address shortcomings in the healthcare service system and contribute to societal well-being through co-creative efforts that offer real-time and customised support for vulnerable healthcare consumers.

This research highlights that visual storytelling on image-based social media offers transformative possibilities for vulnerable healthcare consumers seeking social support in negotiating the challenges of their healthcare consumption experiences.

This study presents a framework of visual storytelling for vulnerable healthcare consumers on image-based social media. Our paper offers three key contributions: that visual storytelling fosters informational and companionship social support for vulnerable healthcare consumers; recognising this occurs through normalising hidden healthcare consumption experiences; and identifying healthcare disclosures, normalising practices and enabling digital affordances as fundamental to this process.

This chapter explores the relationships between 12 single mothers with breast cancer and their children, a subtheme of a larger qualitative study.

Qualitative data were collected via interviews. The study used the ecological systems theoretical framework to explain findings.

In speaking with women about how they constructed and altered their social networks post-diagnosis, many talked about their relationships with their children. This chapter explains how these mothers discussed their diagnoses with their children in age-appropriate ways; how they relied on their children during treatment for informational and emotional support; and how relationships with their children changed during treatment and recovery.

Based on findings from this study, family scientists, public health professionals, and oncology care providers may have a better understanding of the specific concerns and experiences related to the children of breast cancer patients without partners.

This study yields new information about the support needs of single breast cancer patients and their children, and offers insight into what researchers and medical teams can do to better support families affected by breast cancer.

Purpose – The goal of this chapter is to understand the role of nonprofit voluntary health organizations (VHOs) in the lives of Canadian women coping with breast cancer.

Methodology – Through qualitative interviews with breast cancer survivors and records of VHOs active in this field, we assess the level and nature of their interactions and impact on women's quality of life.

Findings – Our findings suggest that at the micro-level, VHOs are venues for women to receive auxiliary services such as information, counseling, and support that complement the mainstream health care provision. While VHO services empower women as health care consumers, we show that they also serve as venues for women to reciprocate by volunteering. This process of reciprocity helps women cope with their own healing and allows them to be not only consumers but also producers of health services.

Research limitations – The non-random nature and the small sample size make our findings not easily generalizable to the larger population of breast cancer survivors; rather they are indicative of the experiences of Canadian women in one large urban metropolitan area.

Value of the chapter – We demonstrate the role of VHOs as venues of health consumerism as well as places for consumers to become involved in the production of services by volunteering.

Breast cancer support businesses, retail stores selling mastectomy-related products, are playing an expanding role within healthcare in the USA. As commercial spaces separate from the medical settings where most cancer treatment occurs, these businesses have been largely overlooked in studies of medical care providers and their experiences. The purpose of this paper is to seek to bring to light the meanings and dimensions of the care work provided by breast cancer support staff to newly diagnosed patients.

This project employed an ethnographic approach centered on the workers at one breast cancer support business. The first author carried out participant observation over a 20-month period and supplemented the observations with staff member interviews.

The analysis of field notes and interviews revealed two themes or purposes as central to the employees’ understanding of their work: defining the organizational setting as a nonmedical space and balancing image enhancement with comforting care. The findings show how values of client-centered care can be enacted in a for-profit healthcare setting.

This study is limited to one for-profit support business in the southeastern USA.

Mastectomy supply businesses appear to offer a kind of support that patients may not be finding elsewhere or at the particular time they need it. Thus the study holds relevance for practitioners and health policy makers who are seeking to develop more comprehensive care for surgical patients within the established healthcare system.

This study gives a detailed picture of breast cancer support work, including the value premises and meanings it holds for support workers.

The purpose of this paper was to understand the lived experiences of women who have been diagnosed, treated and are cancer free as survivors.

Using purposive sampling approach, participants were recruited from two Missouri cancer centers. A total of 15 breast cancer free women (ten white and five black) were interviewed. The participants ranged in age from 34 to 62 years, and all had at least a bachelor degree.

Eight unique themes were identified from the interviews. The women noted that maintaining positive attitude, and support from family and friends were the greatest resources that helped them through their cancer journey. They were generally positive about their experiences but uncertain what “survivor” meant individually and personally.

All the women in this study had at least a college degree, stable family economic resources and health insurance.

The women interviewed in this study did not want to be called breast cancer “survivors” which is a common name for anyone who has been diagnosed, treated and cancer free. For those who are breast cancer educators, nurses, medical practitioners and counselors it is important to consider how they use the word “survivor.” Referring to women who have successfully completed a treatment program for breast cancer as “survivors” attaches an identity that may not be accepted by all.

The National Health Service Breast Screening Programme set up 20 years ago in the UK has to evolve continuously to meet changing needs as a result of fundamental transformations in the age and ethnic profile of the population. This article draws on evidence generated as part of the Healthcare Commission's national study aimed at identifying issues that may contribute to different groups not having equal access to, experience of, or outcomes from services relating to breast screening and breast cancer treatment. Findings indicate that ethnicity has an effect on the awareness of services and of breast cancer. Access to screening and the experience of screening and treatment are influenced by the interaction of ethnicity with age. Younger women from certain black and minority ethnic groups face particular barriers. There can be additional barriers experienced by those from linguistic minorities. Equality of access, experience and outcomes does not mean treating everyone the same way.

The sequence of stress, distress and somatization has occupied much of the late twentieth-century psychological research. The anatomy of stress can be viewed from interactional and hybrid theories that suggest that the individual relates with the surroundings by buffering the harmful effects of stressors. These acts or reactions are called coping strategies and are designed as protection from the stressors and adaptation to them. Failure to successfully adapt to stressors results in psychological distress. In some individuals, elevated levels of distress and failed coping are expressed in physical symptoms, rather than through feelings, words, or actions. Such “somatization” defends against the awareness of the psychological distress, as demonstrated in the psychosocial literature. The progression of behavior resulting from somatic distress moves from a private domain into the public arena, involving an elaborate medicalization process, is however less clear in sociological discourse. The invocation of a medical diagnosis to communicate physical discomfort by way of repeated use of health care services poses a major medical, social and economic problem. The goal of this paper is to clarify this connection by investigating the relevant literature in the area of women with breast cancer. This manuscript focuses on the relationship of psychological stress, the stress response of distress, and the preoccupation with one’s body, and proposes a new theoretical construct.

Despite evidence showing the benefits of early diagnosis of breast cancer many Australian women delay seeking advice when they find a change in their breast. This paper describes the process evaluation of a national programme to encourage women to see their general practitioner within three months of finding a breast change. The programme used a partnership approach involving different sectors of the community to deliver an inexpensive national programme with sustainable community components. The programme included strategies to promote messages through the news media, television commercials, community meetings across Australia and general practitioner based strategies. This paper reports on a process evaluation of the implementation of the programme; outcome measures will be available at a later stage.

Breast cancer is a global public health dilemma and the most prevalent cancer in the world. Effective treatment plans improve patient survival rates and well-being. The five-year survival rate is often used to develop treatment selection and survival prediction models. However, unlike other types of cancer, breast cancer patients can have long survival rates. Therefore, the authors propose a novel two-level framework to provide clinical decision support for treatment selection contingent on survival prediction.

The first level classifies patients into different survival periods using machine learning algorithms. The second level has two models with different survival rates (five-year and ten-year). Thus, based on the classification results of the first level, the authors employed Bayesian networks (BNs) to infer the effect of treatment on survival in the second level.

The authors validated the proposed approach with electronic health record data from the TriNetX Research Network. For the first level, the authors obtained 85% accuracy in survival classification. For the second level, the authors found that the topology of BNs using Causal Minimum Message Length had the highest accuracy and area under the ROC curve for both models. Notably, treatment selection substantially impacted survival rates, implying the two-level approach better aided clinical decision support on treatment selection.

The authors have developed a reference tool for medical practitioners that supports treatment decisions and patient education to identify patient treatment preferences and to enhance patient healthcare.

Purpose – This chapter examines medical consumerism and the changing relations between patients as consumers and the medical system across two women's health contexts, breast cancer and infertility.

Methodology/approach – The analysis draws on two qualitative studies: The first explores the experiences of 60 breast cancer survivors through in-depth interviews and participant observation (Sulik, 2005), and the second uses in-depth interviews to analyze 18 women's experiences with infertility (Eich-Krohm, 2000).

Findings – The medical consumer is an individualized role that shifts attention away from the quality problem in health care and toward the quality of the person as a medical consumer who is characterized to be optimistic, proactive, rational, responsible, and informed.

Research limitations/implications – As medicine has become a form of mass consumption, the category of medical consumer has elevated the individual in medical decision-making. The shift from patient to medical consumer is an ongoing process that is grounded in a tension between medical control and individual agency, and is exacerbated by the intensity and incomprehensibility of modern medicine.

Practical implications – The proliferation of medical information and personal illness narratives through the Internet, advice books, and self-help groups have advanced lay knowledge about preventive medicine and medical treatment while simultaneously introducing new fears and anxiety about the multitude of options and outcomes.

Originality/value of chapter – This study contributes to our knowledge on medical consumerism and its impact on illness experience and the synthesis of lay and professional knowledge.