Rehabilitation in momentum of Norwegian coordination reform
The way rehabilitation is given meaning and practiced relies on contesting assumptions, affecting the conception of who will benefit from rehabilitation and the way professionals define their relationship with patients. This article applies a critical discourse analysis of interviews with rehabilita...
Gorde:
| Argitaratua izan da: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/alterjdr, |
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| Egile Nagusiak: | , , , |
| Formatua: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Hizkuntza: | Anglais |
| Argitaratua: |
Alter
2026
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| Gaiak: | |
| Sarrera elektronikoa: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Gaia: | The way rehabilitation is given meaning and practiced relies on contesting assumptions, affecting the conception of who will benefit from rehabilitation and the way professionals define their relationship with patients. This article applies a critical discourse analysis of interviews with rehabilitation professionals, investigating the way they talk about rehabilitation, and the ways their language use produces utterances, concepts, and affects their practices. The context of the analysis is time of change imposed by Norwegian health reform policies targeted towards efficiency and decreased public health cost. A meta-discourse of goals is identified, in which four further discourses are singled out; rehabilitation as catalyst for a meaningful living; rehabilitation as professional performance; rehabilitation as constraint factor, and rehabilitation as a normative stimulus for independence. The article concludes that rehabilitation professionals include policy-informed rationing in clinical reasoning processes. The consequence is that institutional rehabilitation practices depart from patient-centered, socially invented schemes of care. Rehabilitation professionals act as powerful agents on behalf of the authorities, approaching the disabled and chronically ill in ways to make them independent and self-managing with less involvement of specialized rehabilitation services. |
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