Low prioritization
Nurses may often have recorded patients’ social circumstances in the beginning of an illness trajectory, but neither nurses nor doctors perceived maintaining patients’ social histories as their main task. Patients’ social data did not carry the significance of medical data:
“I don’t think we think about social differences at all because our main focus is on the illness.” (N4:1).
Patients’ social circumstances did, however, have particular relevance on specific wards. Patients on the lung cancer and the urological wards could expect many side-effects for longer periods. Here, HPs seemed more dependent on understanding patients’ capacity to comply with treatment, including social information about support in their everyday lives.
Despite nurses’ intentions on all three wards to ask patients about their social circumstances, any information was not systematically followed up by doctors during the illness trajectory. HPs expressed a preference for encountering the patients in the here-and-now rather than seeking information in their medical record.