Rehabilitation in momentum of Norwegian coordination reform: From practices of discipline to disciplinary practices

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.
Source: ALTER - European Journal of Disability Research - Category: Disability Source Type: research