Luís Gouveia, Catarina Delaunay & Rita Morais (2024)
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, Online first, open access

Abstract. In recent decades, the health sector has witnessed the emergence of social movements of patients aimed at redefining public policies on access to and provision of medical care. These changes are reflected in the conceptual models of patient-centred care, developed to guide medical practice towards patients’ expectations and wishes. However, different patient-centred models remain eminently focused on the dimension of solicitude when attending to patients’ specific needs: interpersonal relations based on the caregiver’s attention to the patient’s singularity. Namely, patients can express other moral references concerning their experiences in clinical contexts. That is the case with hospitality. Based on a Portuguese research project focused on the clinical experience of ART beneficiaries, this article aims to analyse hospitality as a moral orientation with specific proprieties associated with attending to patients’ singularity, thus aiming to contribute to the ongoing discussion and revision of the conceptual models of patient-centred care.”
Extract: “The paper draws on the regimes of engagement in action, conceptualised by Laurent Thévenot (2006, 2019), as the theoretical framework guiding the analytical trajectory. Each regime concerns distinctive formats of actors’ involvement with the surrounding environment, through different forms of cognitive and evaluative appropriation (Thévenot 2007, 2014). Namely, the regimes differ by the type of socially valued good aimed at when engaging with the environment. Thus, each mode of engagement relies on different kinds of normativity in terms of how a given situation is perceived according to a desired good.” (p. 5)