Alla bara vet - om kunskap och omsorg i vårdsektorn

Sammanfattning: Working with relationships and making use of what we commonly call emotions are common in the health and care professions. The purpose of this paper is to explore knowledge in health and care professions – especially in situations that involve strong feelings. Is there any kind of knowledge that gets lost in the process of fitting health and care work into an evidence-based or time-efficient template? Using interviews with health care professionals, data from prior research on home service, and examples from Södertörn Studies in practical Knowledge, three Weberian ideal types of health care workers are stipulated. The ideal types are used to illuminate the kind of knowledge that is ignored in the processes of efficiency, professionalization and embodiment. The data are structured into the ideal types and discussed with reference to Hochschild’s theories on emotional work and feeling rules, Polanyi’s theories on tacit knowledge and anthropological theories on embodied knowledge. The conclusion is that relationship-based knowledge and experience-based knowledge risk being ignored when health care is fitted into evidence-based treatment models or models for time efficiency. On the other hand, when relying on experience-based knowledge, we risk excluding people that do not fit into the common sense idea of a health worker.