A major new six-year study will use philosophical expertise to help bring patient voices into healthcare research and practice.
Researchers at the University of Nottingham, University of Bristol and University of Birmingham have been jointly awarded a £2.5M Wellcome Trust Discovery Grant for the six-year project called 'Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare (EPIC). The study will explore forms of 'silencing' within healthcare.
Patients regularly report that their testimonies and perspectives are ignored, dismissed or explained away by the healthcare profession. These experiences are injustices because they are unfair and harmful - and philosophers call them 'epistemic injustices' because they jeopardise patient care and undermine trust in healthcare staff and systems.
By studying these epistemic injustices, Project EPIC will find ways to correct them in order to benefit patients and healthcare practitioners alike.
The five-person Project EPIC team has internationally-recognised expertise in philosophy, psychiatry, and law. At Bristol, Professor Havi Carel, the project leader, is an authority on philosophy and phenomenology of illness while Prof Sheelagh McGuinness is an authority on health, gender, and the law. The Birmingham team is Professor Lisa Bortolotti, a philosopher of psychiatry and editor of Philosophical Psychology, and Professor Matthew Broome, an academic NHS psychiatrist and Director of the Birmingham Institute for Mental Health. The Nottingham lead is Dr Ian James Kidd, an epistemologist and philosopher of illness, who has pioneered the study of epistemic injustices in healthcare with Professor Carel. The Project EPIC team will be completed by six postdoctoral researchers.
Patients have long reported feeling ignored, dismissed, or silenced in ways that jeopardise their care and intensify their suffering. The challenge is to understand how this silencing happens and what can be done about it, in ways that can help patients and healthcare practitioners alike. The NHS is right to seek 'patient perspectives' and listen to 'patient voices'. Project EPIC will help them to do that better by fully diagnosing the causes of that silencing.
EPIC draws on the work by philosophers and social scientists, healthcare researchers and practitioners, and the testimonies and perspectives of patients and their advocates. "We cannot study epistemic injustices in healthcare by listening only to one set of voices", says Ian James Kidd.
The six case studies include labour pain, child mental health, neurodiversity, cancer and depression, and later-life care. The case studies involve collaborations with colleagues the universities of Bologna and Ferrara, Italy.
