Hospitalets strategiske patientkommunikation: - styring af sundhedsprofessionel praksis?

Over the past two decades, public organizations have increasingly introduced strategies inspired by private actors on how to improve communication with targets groups. Recently, patient communication has become a strategic priority at hospitals. Today communication is a focal point in policies, plans and daily work practices. Hospitals create communication strategies and build communication departments to improve communication with patients - not just in face-to-face interaction between doctor and patient in clinical settings - but as a practice permeating the organization as a whole. The institutional attempts to strategize hospital communication have primarily been discussed as an effect of New Public Management within an institutional framework on organizational legitimacy and identity.
However, there is a lack of empirical studies of how strategic communication affects collaboration among professional groups within the organization. The empirical focus of this paper is a case referred to as ‘The Perspective of the Patient': a user-oriented communication strategy developed locally at a public Danish hospital. In this paper I trace how the strategy is being disseminated. The primary aim is to highlight how strategic communication unfolds as distributed governance. I argue that tensions in the strategy and its implementation are effects of a social constructivist approach. On the one hand the strategy focuses on different perspectives, and on the other hand it insists on theoretical predefined standards and a privileged perspective from which organizational practices can be observed. The paper argues that organizational actors must pay attention to the paradoxes that strategic use of a social constructivist approach entails. Prospectively, I suggest including different perspectives and practices as embedded components in developing and disseminating organizational strategies – especially strategies on communication.