Hopes and expectations of swedish cancer patients: Contradictions surrounding patient satisfaction with care

This paper presents a study of hopes and expectations concerning the professional health‐care sector, as expressed by a group of Swedish cancer patients. The data are derived from a cross‐sectional interview study of patients diagnosed with a malignant disease at one general hospital in Stockholm in 1987. A seeming discrepancy exists between the problematic situations and experiences described in narrative form by the participants, and the high rate of positive responses to direct questions concerned with satisfaction with care in this study. A combination of data types and an analytic process derived from medical anthropology has been utilized in order to understand the culturally related hopes and expectations which are behind statements of satisfaction with care. Hopes and expectations reflect the perceived breadth and limits of the professional health‐care sector. Patients appear to organize their experiences in manners which ‘work’. General dissatisfaction with care may not be an effective technique for promoting well‐being when diagnosed with a potentially life‐threatening disease. The patients in this study actively avoid dissatisfaction in a number of ways, which include assuming responsibility themselves, accepting the unarticulated as a form of discourse and adapting frameworks for that which is ‘normal’ from the professional sector.