Patient Education

Patient education

Tine Larsen

Tine Larsen’s project is about disease-specific patient education, where patients with potentially life-threatening chronic diseases are trained to take responsibility for monitoring and treatment of their illness at home. Specifically, she works with self-managed oral anticoagulation therapy for patients with an increased risk of thrombosis (anticoagulant therapy) and automated peritoneal dialysis for patients with terminal renal failure (P-dialysis); both treatments involving technologically highly complicated medical equipment, which in itself can be dangerous if not used properly.

Tine described in her PhD project how patients were instructed to apply this equipment so they eventually were qualified to take it home and wouldn’t need to come so often to the hospital for treatment. She demonstrated how different instruction practices created various opportunities (and challenges) for the patients to follow the instructions and for nurses to understand patients’ understanding of the treatments, and ultimately to patients’ opportunities to learn.

Tine’s postdoctoral project examines how the different technologies’ physical properties and characteristics are relevant for the interaction, and how they together with the material environment shape instructions. Currently she focuses on how the immediate possibilities (for physical action that the medical technologies and objects allow due to ailment and treatment specific considerations) are differentiated, redefined and limited in and through interaction.