The Social Life of Wounds: Understanding (De)personalisation in Wound Care

This study explores how chronic wounds may come to acquire their own social life as actors within the clinical care encounter and what effects the (de)personalisation of wounds may have on patients’ care trajectories. Drawing on ethnographic data from specialist outpatient wound healing clinics in the United Kingdom and selected extracts from interviews with wound care clinicians, this study distinguishes three (de)personalisation practices through which wounds become separated from the patient’s self and acquire social significance as actors within the care encounters: anthropomorphising, objectifying, and alienating wounds. Drawing on critical realism as an analytic orientation, the study then explains the ways in which wound (de)personalisation influences communication, clinical decision-making, and emotional work through material, relational, emotional, cultural, and organisational mechanisms that shape care trajectories within a healthcare context characterised by chronicity and scarcity.