Implementation of patient participation in rehabilitation: An approach caught between different ideologies

The definition of specialised rehabilitation in Europe has changed from a focus on patients' bodily functions and work tasks to a patient-centred focus prioritising patients' wishes, allowing patients to actively collaborate and set their own goals. This study aimed to explore interprofessional healthcare teams' discursive practice regarding the implementation of patient participation in specialised rehabilitation units in Norway. Data were collected from three focus groups with seven different health professions, totalling 18 healthcare professionals. A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis outlined by Fairclough was used to analyse the data. Three interdiscursive discourses based on different and opposing ideologies were found: (1) the discourse of standardisation, in which healthcare professionals used international models for rehabilitation goal setting; (2) the discourse of interprofessional experts, in which healthcare professionals constructed themselves as experts; and (3) the discourse of patient responsibility, in which the patients were constructed as having rights and autonomy. The sociocultural practice of implementing patient participation in specialised rehabilitation in Norway highlighted a hegemonic struggle between standardisation; paternalistic and autonomy ideologies; ethical dilemmas between healthcare professionals' knowledge and use of standardised goals; and patients' autonomy, knowledge, and will.