Finding Meaning in Healthcare: Looking Through the Hermeneutic Window

This pioneering book illustrates the ways in which an interpretive or hermeneutic stance can be incorporated into modern healthcare across clinical practice, clinical ethics, education and leadership – and the transformative effects of doing so. Combining practical case studies and narrative, this book introduces the hermeneutic window, in which meaning making frames clinical and educational decision making. It shows how best practice requires more than clinical knowledge, communication skills and application of evidence based medicine. It is within the hermeneutic window that assumptions, meanings and values are examined, questioned and re-examined. Drawing on a wide range of expertise, the chapters challenge existing assumptions about the essence of healthcare and the role that clinicians play within it. This book is valuable reading for all healthcare practitioners, particularly GPs, physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as professions allied to medicine, medical students and other trainees.