Joar Björk

My current research concerns the challenging trade-offs between on the one hand time spent on medical interventions and, on the other, time spent on communicating with patients. In Sweden, the priority setting framework demands that medical interventions be prioritised according to the patient’s need, whereas the juridical scaffolding of communicating with patient presents patients’ right to information as unconnected to (medical) need. Hence, healthcare personnel can be caught in a difficult dilemma when they have to choose between providing interventions and communicating. I aim to analyse this dilemma normatively as well as descriptively.