Challenging times: disconnects between patient and professional temporalities in chronic condition management

Chronic health conditions represent a key challenge for contemporary public healthcare. Current policy promotes self-management support to reduce demands on health services and improve patients’ health and wellbeing. Though there is emerging recognition that self-management is achieved in collaboration between health professionals and patients, how chronicity is managed in interaction remains relatively underexplored in research. In this paper we report on research examining how people are supported to self-manage their conditions through their healthcare encounters. We draw on observational data from consultations between people with multiple chronic health conditions and their healthcare professionals, and semi-structured interviews with both patients and professionals about these consultations. We illuminate points of disconnect between patients and health professionals and demonstrate how these disconnects unfold in self-management support interactions. We argue that self-management is temporally and socially situated, incorporating past, present and (anticipated) future experiences. However, there is a disjuncture between the temporal logics of self-management enacted by health professionals and the subjective temporalities of people’s lived experience of chronicity. Health professionals focus on patients progressing toward optimistic futures but give less attention to the complexities of patient life histories that render self-management more difficult. For self-management support to be effective, we argue that health professionals need to consider the complexities of people’s life histories and how these shape imagined futures. Policy guidelines, we argue, should attend to how relations between patients and professionals shape self-management support, and the historical and social factors that shape experiences of living with chronic conditions.