‘To improve patients’ quality of life’. An ethnography of nephrologists in Austria

Quality of life has become a central value in the provision of healthcare for patients with chronic conditions. This has engendered debates in STS and medical sociology on the non-neutral effects that valuing health and illness, medical interventions, and health care delivery in terms of ‘quality of life’ yields. Focusing on the case of nephrology, in this talk I will present ethnographic materials collected in Austria of two dialysis units in which nephrologists had launched projects aimed towards ‘the improvement of patients’ quality of life’. Whereas the first involved nurses supporting patients in the administration of peritoneal dialysis at home, the second implied the provision of treatment and care exclusively focused on a well-being ‘in the here and now’. Valuing medical interventions in terms of quality of life, I will argue, may not only lead to a governmentalization of living and an economisation of health. It also allows physicians to articulate a socio-medico-ethical problem – the availability of life-prolonging technologies for a growing population of elderly, multimorbid patients – and develop solutions locally. I will end by suggesting further investigation into situations in which physicians critically examine the provision of healthcare they are embedded in and experimentation with STS concepts to articulate this phenomenon.

Speaker at the event, Anna Mann, is a PostDoc researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on the enactments, negotiations, and transformations of ‘good care’ in medical practice. Currently she is leading the project “(Im-)possibilities of letting life end” financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Anna has published in journals such as the Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, Health, and the Journal of Responsible Innovation.