Aligning patient candidacy and staff legitimacy to enable person-centred care

Description

Candidacy theory (Dixon-woods 2006) considers patients’ perceived eligibility for care services alongside the role of care services, but less attention has been paid to the individual responsibility and perceptions of staff. To date there has been little examination of how staff perceive patient candidacy, which we frame as staff perceptions of legitimacy, especially where services are deemed and even constructed to be easily accessible such as urgent and emergency care.
As part of a wider mixed methods study exploring social reasons for frequent ambulance use (Moseley et al., 2024), qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 ambulance staff and seven service users in the North East of England between March and October 2023. A number of inductive themes were identified as part of the broader study, these highlighted the complex and cyclic nature of poor health, social isolation and loneliness, and how this contributes to contact with the ambulance service. This presentation builds on further abductive analysis, which involved an iterative process between theory and data with a specific deductive focus on patient candidacy and staff legitimacy.
This presentation contends that both patient candidacy and staff legitimacy are important in explaining and understanding some healthcare interactions in urgent and emergency care. We suggest that, even if patients deem themselves to be eligible candidates, individual staff and healthcare organisations need to view patients’ candidacy as being legitimate, without which it is not possible to deliver high quality, person-centred care.

Period	10 Sept 2025
Event title	BSA Medical Sociology Annual Conference 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	Newcastle upon Tyne, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National