Accomplishing ‘the case’ in paediatrics and child health: medicine and morality in...

Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. 24 No. 4 2002 ISSN 0141–9889, pp. 409–435

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd/Editorial Board 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA

Blackwell Science LtdOxford, UKSHILSociology of Health & Illness0141–9889© Blackwell Publishers Ltd/Editorial Board 200120022441000Original ArticleAccomplishing ‘the case’ in paediatrics and child healthSusan White

Accomplishing ‘the case’ in paediatrics and child health: medicine and morality in inter-professional talkSusan White

Department of Applied Social Science, University of Manchester

Abstract

This paper presents data from a recently completed ESRC funded ethnography of social relations and case formulation in an integrated child health service, comprising paediatric inpatient and outpatient, child and adolescent mental health and child development services. Children present to the services with symptoms or troubles for which there are often competing biological, neurological, genetic and/or psychosocial models of causation. As a consequence, clinicians’ talk is oriented to deciding between three main potential types of case formulation –

medical, psychosocial

and

not just medical

. These three formulations are not static ideal-types. They are highly contestable and require complex practical and rhetorical work, through which facts and evidence are selectively invoked and different parties to the case are granted attributes which construct and reconstruct past events to render ambiguous symptoms or events understandable. In particular, moral judgements and complex characterizations about the child’s parents, or significant others, often form an indispensable warrant for these formulations. By analysing professional narratives about cases, this paper develops previous ethnographic work on the classification in medical work of children and adults as good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, culpable or blameless, and renders visible a repertoire of moral formulations about childhood and child care. In particular, judgements about the adequacy of parental love are central to clinical reasoning.

Keywords:

paediatrics, ethnography, professional talk, case formulation, moraljudgement

410 Susan White

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd/Editorial Board 2002

Introduction

Over the last decade, as a result of rising managerialism and consumerismin public services, an increasing need to ration services and a series of high-profile media scandals, professional judgement has received unprecedentedlevels of political and academic scrutiny. The dominant policy response hasbeen the promotion of evidence-based practice (EBP), which promises rationalfoundations for clinical decisions based on a secure, external knowledgebase uncontaminated by the contingencies and emotions of practice. EBP,however, provides a very partial representation of the processes of clinicalreasoning. In particular, a preoccupation with ‘what works?’ has led to aneglect of the processes and practices by which professionals negotiate andcarry out problem formulation, in what are often uncertain and ambiguouscircumstances. This paper examines case formulations in a child health set-ting. It is concerned with how professionals order clusters of symptoms andtroubles into a recognisable case. The paper argues such work can informcurrent debates about clinical judgement and create more sophisticatedunderstandings of the moral complexities of child health work.

The data presented in this paper are part of a corpus generated from anESRC funded, ethnographic study of an integrated child health service situatedin a district general hospital in the North of England. The service comprisespaediatric inpatient and outpatient, child and adolescent mental health(CAMHS), child development (CDS) and social work services. Together, theservices provide general secondary care to a socio-economically diversecommunity, with tertiary specialist services provided at regional centres. Asingle case study design was used, with the author as sole researcher. Methodsincluded non-participant observation of clinics, ward rounds and staff/teammeetings, audio-recording of interprofessional talk in meetings and otherless formal settings, such as before and after clinics, the tracking of a numberof individual cases through the services and a documentary analysis of medicalnotes. The fieldwork took place between July 1999 and October 2000.

There is a rich, established ethnographic literature on medical practice inchild health settings (inter alia, Strong 1979, Silverman 1987). However, asAnspach notes:

Although much has been written concerning how doctors talk

to

patients, very little has been written about how doctors talk

about

patients . . . This analytic focus on the medical interview occurs even though the way in which physicians talk about patients is a potentially valuable source of information about medical culture. Rarely do doctors reveal their assumptions about patients when they are talking to them (1988: 358).

Where attention has been paid to interprofessional talk, such as in Jeffrey’s(1979) study of classification of ‘good patients, bad patients and rubbish’in an A&E department, this has rarely been grounded in the analysis of

Accomplishing ‘the case’ in paediatrics and child health 411


talk in context. With some notable exceptions (for example, Anspach 1988,Atkinson 1995), there has been a tendency for studies to present decontex-tualised extracts from fieldnotes, which are often used ironically to contrastwhat ‘really’ happens in the service with the ethics and standards uponwhich professional activity purports to be based. Clearly these studies haveconsiderable utility, but they miss the opportunity to examine in detail thesocially-shared discursive resources used by professionals when they talktogether. In the analysis below this paper shows how the situated accountsand the stories told and retold by paediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists,nurses and social workers in the service have certain expectable features anddo particular work. They perform and reproduce aspects of occupationaland service identities and they accomplish particular classifications of cases.They also do important moral work, and in this sense this study confirmsand develops previous work on the classification of patients as ‘good’,‘bad’, or indeed as unremarkable and ordinary (

e.g.

Jeffrey 1979, Dingwalland Murray 1983). Before considering these arguments in more detail, it isimportant to explain the often complex and contested nature of case formula-tion in paediatrics.

The problematics of case formulation in child health

As in other medical settings, the ordinary work of the services in the studyis oriented towards establishing relations of cause and effect. When membersaccount for their work, they do so in terms of identifying what (if anything)is wrong with the children (and/or families) referred to the service, decidingwhat should be done about it, or getting on with whatever it is that needsto be done.

In child health settings, however, the attribution of causation can be par-ticularly complex. Clearly, many children present to services with symptomswhich may be unproblematically categorised and treated according to theestablished nosologies of bio-medicine, but for many others this is not thecase. For example, children might present with a physical complaint forwhich there may be a biological, neurological, genetic and/or psychosocialaetiology. The obvious examples are enuresis, encopresis, constipation,various forms of developmental delay, communication or behavioural dis-orders and psychological distress. In accomplishing diagnosis and establishingcausation in such cases, the boundary between problems with a biological,and those with a psychological or psychosocial aetiology, is particularlyimportant for members, and is underscored in professional literature (

e.g.

Woodward

et al

. 1998, Garralda 1996). The diagnostic categories themselvesfrequently reflect the same preoccupation (

e.g.

‘failure to thrive’ is routinelysubdivided into organic (intrinsic) and non-organic (psycho-social) varieties).

The decision about whether a problem is part of the child’s biologicalmake-up, or a product of their environment, clearly has a direct bearing on

412 Susan White


the management of a case. For example, the suspicion that poor weight gainis not the result of genetics, or a metabolic disorder, but is an indicationthat the child is not being fed or is emotionally deprived, may precipitatereferral to psychologists, child psychiatrists and social workers, rather thanadmission to a paediatric bed. The terrain is further complicated by theclassification of a range of psychological or emotional sequelae to physicalillnesses (see

e.g.

Garralda 1994), which can create problems in the attri-bution of cause and effect. For example, are a child’s frequent hospitaladmissions the result of intrinsic diabetic instability, a consequence of thechild’s emotional adjustment, or of poor parental supervision, or do allthree apply?

These are important empirical questions to which members are routinelyoriented in their daily practices. Whilst clinicians and professionals in theservices are concerned with doing this, this paper focuses on

how

they do it.In particular, it is concerned with how professionals render their formula-tions recognisable and accountable to colleagues. So, how are categories,clinical symptoms, histories and normative judgements invoked and assembledto do the descriptions upon which the work of the clinic depends?

Telling the case

There are many contexts and situations in which professionals in the servicestalk to each other about cases. Such talk takes place in formal meetingswhere detailed formulations of cases are delivered, often in long narrativeturns. It takes place in abridged form in regular ‘updates’ before clinics, orduring ward rounds or nursing ‘handovers’. It takes place over the telephoneand over coffee. Often the same case may be talked about over and overagain in many different forums. Wherever it takes place, talk does particularordering work. It turns symptoms and events into cases which are recognis-able to members and can be processed using one or more of a range ofpotential disposals.

At the beginning of the fieldwork for this study, a good deal of time wasspent shadowing various professionals and clinicians as they went abouttheir business. During this time I witnessed many chance encounters in cor-ridors where particularly unusual, distressing, amusing or urgent anecdotesmight be exchanged. With the exception of impromptu referrals to anotherprofessional – ‘could you see this child I saw this morning, I think she needs. . .’ – for the most part these encounters were used to give brief updatesabout shared cases. The formulation of the case was rarely explicitly stated,but nevertheless was apparent to the hearer, and usually to me. I have manyyears of experience as a professional and a sociological researcher in childhealth settings, so my ability to read the case is not particularly remarkable.Yet, it is also intriguing. How is it that, through the telling, this casebecomes evident to the hearer as this or that kind of case and what is the



available repertoire of formulations? By this or that type of case, I do notrefer to the nosological category to which the child or young person hasbeen assigned (

e.g.

whether they have diabetes); this is usually explicitly stated,or a range of hypotheses are presented. Rather, I want to attend to ways inwhich members work up versions of causation through their talk in what isoften highly contestable terrain.

It has already been noted that clinicians in child health settings routinelymake distinctions between medical and (psycho)social cases. In this respect,paediatrics is similar to geriatrics where Latimer (2000) has shown howpatients are constituted through professional talk as ‘medical’ or ‘social’.Whereas in geriatrics the ‘bringing off’ of a social categorisation is likely toresult in patients being seen as inappropriate, or as ‘bed-blockers’, in childhealth services, particularly multi-disciplinary ones, the classification‘psychosocial’ still carries service entitlements, but of a different nature to‘medical’ cases. So, how do clinicians ‘tell’ cases so that they can be recog-nisable as medical or social or a mixture of the two. When looked at intranscript, it is clear that very different linguistic devices are used to signalparticular readings of the case.

This does not mean that clinicians’ talk straightforwardly describes differ-ent kinds of cases, rather the case is, at least in part,

constituted

through thetelling, and other possible readings are closed down. In the telling of cases,clinicians are not only using knowledge and ‘know-how’, they are veryclearly

makin

g knowledge (Taylor and White 2000). That is, the same casemay be told in many different ways (and often is when a new professionalbecomes involved and sees things differently). Neither does the propensityto see a case as either medical or psychosocial divide neatly by occupationalgroup. For example, during my time in the service, a difference of opinionoccurred between a child psychiatrist and a paediatrician over the diagnosisand management of a child referred because he was having ‘funny turns’The child psychiatrist hypothesised that this was epilepsy and ordered anEEG (a medical reading). The paediatrician, on the other hand, whom wemight assume to be less inclined to see potentially medical problems inrelational terms, argued that the child was hyperventilating in response toproblems in his relationship with his mother (a psychosocial reading). TheEEG did not show any abnormalities, which was again variously invokedas a warrant for very different case formulations. The paediatrician usedit as confirmation of the psychosocial formulation, whereas the psychiatristinvoked the fallibility of the EEG as a diagnostic tool in the identificationof seizures, arguing for more tests and observations. There is thus a strongcase for examining the argumentative strategies of professionals in workingup versions of cases.

In the analysis that follows, as part of a more eclectic approach to examin-ing the rhetorical features of the talk, I have made some use of Sacks’work on membership categorisation analysis (

e.g

. 1972, 1992, or for a moreaccessible summary, Silverman 1998). Sacks argues that, along with certain

414 Susan White


sequential features of an utterance, the use of social categories such as‘mother’ or ‘child’ can operate as a means of referencing deviance or nor-mality in talk

1

. That is to say, membership categories are associated withcertain likely activities (category-bound activities – CBAs), and by describ-ing behaviour which either conforms or fails to conform to these expecta-tions we may establish positive or negative moral identities. So, if ‘mother’is associated with nurturance and care, a description of behaviours depart-ing from these expectations will serve to reference deviance. Membershipcategories are in turn associated with membership categorisation devices(MCDs), so ‘mother’ and ‘child’ are categories of the membership categorisa-tion device ‘family’. Some categories tend to occur in pairs signalling mutualrights, duties or obligations, of which mother-child or doctor-patient areexamples. These pairings are termed standardised relational pairs (SRPs).Often membership categories are explicitly stated (

e.g.

this is a patient), butsometimes they are referenced by association to some activity or attributeassociated with a category (

e.g.

I have observed these symptoms), that is,categorisation can be done by invoking the

predicates

of a category, asHousley notes:

[I]f the topic was the moral evaluation of an individual, one might state ‘I don’t like him/her, s/he is a bad person’ . . . or one might refer to the same person as being ‘lazy’, recount stories of their behaviour on previous occasions (they drank too much at a party), or suggest that their outward appearance conceals some dark motives (

e.g.

their eyes are too close together, etc.). In both cases these strategies can be used to do various types of work within

occasioned

settings. . . . (2000: 104–5)

Clinicians routinely use both categories and predicates of categories in theirwork. However, membership categorisation analysis (MCA) has been used hereas part of a more general orientation to the rhetorical features of the talk, andparticularly to the kinds of warrants clinicians invoke for their versions of cases.

Telling a medical case

During an observation of a paediatric clinic, towards the end of the field-work, one of the paediatricians, stated ‘My cases are all really boring, notlike Jane and David’s [other paediatricians], mine are purely medical’. Janeand David are both associated in different ways with ‘messy’ social cases.The idea that ‘purely medical’ cases are in some way of less interest, is bothuntrue and in itself interesting. Telling a medical case and rendering itintelligible even to an audience with a shared interpretive repertoire is acomplex business. Moreover, medical cases are often far from straightforward(although, of course, many patients are processed, quickly, routinely andunremarkably).



The following extract is taken from a briefing session before an outpatientclinic. The speakers are a consultant paediatrician and a registrar.

Extract 1

Cons: Matthew LongReg: [Mmm]Cons: He’s been in with asthma but that’s not why he comes to see us

(.4)

2

. The main reason is some hydronephrosis – I think I’ve got the last ( ) seems to have a problem attending [reading] Repeat ultrasound October 99, it’s still hydronephrosis, further up (.5) urinary tract infection, yeah, for definite.

Reg: That’s back in (.) AprilCons: Back in April. DMSA [dimercaptosuccinic acid – test to assess

scarring and relative function of kidney] clear. Mild right sided hydronephrosis with prominent renal pelvis mainly extra renal, no scarring and (.) no (.) reflux. (.7) So, I suppose I thought that the best way was to do repeat the ultrasound if the kidney was blowing up and we needed a ( ), so that’s fine. It’s difficult sometimes with these mild hydronephrosis. You never know whether it’s the beginning of –

Reg: Or whether it’s borderline-Cons: Or whether it’s just the [way] they’re made-Reg: [Yeah] yeah

In this account, the patient is identified first by his name ‘Matthew Long’,but thereafter the account is ‘depersonalized’ (Anspach 1988) with referenceto the diagnostic categories, asthma and hydronephrosis. This talk doesnot have the pedagogic flavour of conversation between junior and seniorclinicians, with the junior encouraged to practise case presentation forevaluation by the experienced colleague (Atkinson 1999). Rather, the twoclinicians are telling the case together. The account has a number of markersof certainty ‘urinary tract infection, yeah, for definite’, but these are juxta-posed with markers of uncertainty, warranted principally by clinical experi-ence ‘It’s difficult sometimes with these mild hydronephrosis’. Referencesto the limits and fallibilities of tests’ technology are typical of this kind oftelling.

References to character(istics) in this account are confined to the interiorof Matthew’s body. Although Matthew could have been categorised as achild, he remains in the membership category ‘patient’ which mean thatother categories in the device ‘family’ are not immediately relevant.

It is typical of ‘medical’ cases, that there is very little character work inthe accounts and where parents are invoked it is generally through ‘reportedspeech’,

e.g.

‘mother says she’s managing well without the oxygen’; or tosignal moral worth,

e.g.

‘mum’s lovely with her’. So, medical cases are ren-dered recognisable as such by the particular ways in which they are told.

416 Susan White


These tellings induct novices and affirm, transmit and legitimate medicalknowledge, but more mundanely they get diagnosis done.

Telling a psychosocial case

Here, the speaker is a clinical psychologist in the Child and AdolescentMental Health Service (CAHMS) weekly professionals’ consultation group.

Extract 2

Clin psych: Michael Eaton is a five-year-old boy who was referred for behaviour problems and when they came, Mrs Eaton has been very depressed for five years, she’s had occasional admission to [psychiatric hospital], she’s had cognitive therapy at [psychiatric hospital] she’s had psychotherapy and counselling there as well that they’d organised. She’s been on medication. Various different types and as I’ve said she’s had inpatient admissions. Both Mr and Mrs Eaton say that Michael actually probably behaves much like any other five-year-old and that he doesn’t have any problems, school aren’t worried they don’t think he’s got any problems but Mrs Eaton can’t stand him and that’s the problem. She’s very depressed, she can’t bear him, she gets absolutely no pleasure out of his company whatsoever, ehm she you know to the point where she’s actually got a two-year-old as well. She’s completely bonded with the two-year-old and feels very warm towards him and deals with his misbehaviour perfectly appropriately but can’t-. I mean, when you see the two of them in a room when her eyes are on Michael she’s all kind of gritting her teeth and by him and yet when she looks at Bradley, the younger one, she kind of softens and smiling and indulgent and ehm and she’s broken hearted about this, but she can’t stand her own son. Ehm, we talked a lot about, I mean she’s so depressed that, you know, her sort of negativity colours everything.

This is typical of the narrative practices in psychosocial cases. The emphasisis on the child’s significant others, and there are reports of particular‘unhappy incidents’ (Pomerantz 1978) which, together with assigning themother to the membership of the category ‘psychiatric patient’, accomplishher responsibility for the problems. The standardised relational pair, mother-son is used to signal departure from category-bound expectations and obliga-tions (mothers love sons) and from category-bound rights (sons are lovedby mothers). In psychosocial cases, this pairing often takes the place of theSRP doctor-patient which situates the patient as worthy and in need of



care and the doctor as obliged to offer help for medical troubles. ‘Extremecase formulations’ (Pomerantz 1986), which invoke the maximal or minimalattributes of a person or event, are powerful devices for referencing blame(or creditworthiness) in talk. These devices are common in psychosocialtellings (

e.g.

‘she

can’t bear

him, she gets

absolutely

no pleasure out of hiscompany

whatsoever

, irritated

beyond belief

, she’s broken hearted about this,but she

can’t stand

her own son, she’s

completely

bonded with the two-year-old’). These further facilitate the characterisation of the parent both asfailing and as deviant.

The account is also designed to convey intractability ‘Mrs Eaton has beenvery depressed for five years, she’s had occasional admission to [psychiatrichospital], she’s had cognitive therapy at [psychiatric hospital], she’s had psy-chotherapy and counselling there as well that they’d organised. She’s beenon medication’. This is important in psychosocial cases, for the ameliorationof which no ready technologies exist, but about which professionals aresupposed to make a difference. So, invoking the list of ‘tried and failed’ herefunctions as a kind of prospective self-exoneration and ‘expectation manage-ment’ device for the clinician who is speaking.

The case above was already packaged (by the referrer) on referral to theservice as a ‘psychosocial’ case. This is not always so. Problems referred as‘medical’ issues may, over time, become redefined (or socialised) into a psy-chosocial reading. In these cases, the paediatrician has powerful definitionalprivilege to adjudicate on whether it is the inside, or outside, of the child’sbody that is causing the trouble. The following extract, like the one above,begins with a characterisation of the mother, achieved through the invoca-tion of the membership category ‘psychiatric patient’. The speakers are aconsultant paediatrician and a registrar.

Extract 3

Cons: Mark Smith – you’ve not had the pleasure, of this mother. Mother is under our psychiatrists. She is a (2.0) oh (2.0) factitious illness gives the wrong impression. She’s got a [neurotic] state really, somatisation

Reg: [Right] right.Cons: [Somatisation], really

severe

somatisation disorder Reg: [right] yeahCons: You, you may have met her [ . . . as soon as you meet her,

she’ll go on]- Reg: [I think I probably-. What’s he got?] Cons: He’s constipated, severely constipated-Reg: Yes, it’s all, yesCons: She looks ill and as soon as you meet her she looks ill and she’ll

come out with all of her complaints. He has severe constipation actually required a ( ) when they first brought him in to extract the masses of faeces, but recently he’s relapsed and the problem

418 Susan White


seemed to be that mum had relapsed as well so everything went (.) down and he had to come in for an enema-

Despite the presence of a physical complaint, constipation, this case is markedas psychosocial by its telling. The character work in the telling is heard byexperienced clinicians as part of the diagnosis and clear attributions of causeand effect are made:

‘but recently he’s relapsed and the problem seemed to be that mum had relapsed as well so everything went (.) down’.

These extracts demonstrate the very different ways in which medical andpsychosocial cases are told, but the most complex rhetorical work takesplace in relation to children who have an identified and named ‘medical’problem, which is generally agreed to exist independently of any issues aboutparenting, but this medical problem is seen as being exacerbated by parentingpractices (

e.g.

children with unstable diabetes whose parents are suspectedof mismanaging diet). Members do not have a discrete name for thesekinds of formulation. They are identified by medical diagnosis with accom-panying narratives about parents/carers, or references to ‘possible childprotection issues’. The formulations can however be distinguished byaspects of their telling; for the purposes of differentiation, I have calledthem ‘not just medical’ cases. This is as close as I can get to a members’term for what is a recognisable members’ category of case formulation.These formulations involve particularly complex story-telling, since thepresence of an ‘intrinsic’ disorder requires that any psychosocial componentbe worked up in the talk. Narratives about these cases have the flavour ofdetective stories with anomalous physical findings, such as failure to gainweight, set alongside characterisations of carers. Cases may begin as ‘med-ical’ and evolve gradually to a ‘not just medical’, or psychosocial formulationthrough formal and informal case-talk between professionals. Once theyhave shifted in this way, they rarely return to a purely medical reading, sincethe relevances for storytelling and observation are extended to the child’srelationships and social circumstances, which once exposed are almostalways found wanting.

The natural and the social: ‘not just medical’ cases

‘Not just medical’ cases are common in paediatrics and may subsequentlybe referred to CAMHS or social work services. They are the most analytic-ally interesting since, once clinicians have agreed that there is somethingmedically wrong with the child, this skews the ages and stages of likelyphysical, emotional and social development as calibrated by developmentalpsychology and surveillance medicine (White 1998). Thus, the boundaries



between normality and abnormality become more fluid and contestable. Forexample, if a child has cerebral palsy and has difficulty swallowing andchewing, it is likely that her weight gain will be slow. This exists as an avail-able explanation for poor weight gain and, in the absence of dramatic weightloss, clinicians need not necessarily question further. Further investigationmust thus be triggered by something, and this is a highly contestable andoften practically onerous process, often relying substantially on moraljudgement and techniques of persuasion.

As well as requiring artful and persuasive telling, these formulations mayinvolve practical detective work, rigorous questioning of ‘witnesses’, crosschecking of parental accounts and an almost forensic attention to detail.The propensities to look inwards to the child’s body, or outwards to theirsocial circumstances are not evenly distributed among clinicians. Those whofavour particular explanations, or who are especially likely to undertake thenecessary detective work to shift a case into a ‘not just medical’ reading, arewell known in the organisation and the network beyond. This can affect thetype of case they are asked to see.

The following more extended example shows the rhetorical and practicalwork involved in bringing off a ‘not just medical’ reading of a case. It istaken from a professionals’ meeting (parents absent), convened to con-sider the need to invoke child protection procedures in respect of a child,Sarah, who has a rare syndrome (omitted to protect anonymity), associ-ated with multiple abnormalities. Sarah has had frequent admissions tohospital for a variety of reasons and the consultant has noticed over timethat, on her return home, she loses the weight she has gained in hospital.The transcript of the meeting is some 19 pages long. These extractshave been chosen because they illustrate the major strategies of argu-mentation and the various warrants used for a potentially contestablecase formulation.

The speaker is the consultant paediatrician responsible for Sarah’scare, who begins a long turn by outlining some of the child’s medicalproblems, specifically directing much of the talk to Jenny, the social workteam leader, reflecting the purpose of the meeting (whether or not to useformal child protection procedures). Whilst there is only one speaker formuch of this story, the talk is clearly oriented to the possibility of reply, thatis to the audience and to the contingencies of the situation as social andconsequential.

Extract 4a

Cons: . . . Right, OK, if I just take you through my report, Sarah’s 20 months old now and I’ve only known her since July. She has [ ] Syndrome and if you look at page 3 of your pages, [ ] Syndrome is the name given to a child with a collection of differences. . . . Right so as part of Sarah’s [ ] Syndrome she has a heart problem that has actually required surgery but is now off

420 Susan White


medication for that. She had a problem with her stomach and needed surgery on that. She’s got a mild kidney problem and requires antibiotics for that. She’s got some deafness and she’s got a problem with one of her eyes and she’s relatively short, so there are a collection of medical issues. . . . When I took her over, she was under nine different consultants for various bits of her care. When I do a full report I’ll expand on all of those, Jenny [social work team leader], but I think it would take a long time to go into them and I think it’s better to stick to the salient features of it really. I first met her because she came in with problems with diabetes, that is not related to the [ ] Syndrome and she’s also got asthma.

In this first extract, despite reference to her age, Sarah is located in thecategory patient and the account is depersonalised with a list of her clinicalfeatures. It reads like a medical case, but the explicit direction of the talk toJenny, the social work team leader, alludes to what is to come. The case mustat some point become constructed as the proper business of the social ser-vices department. The consultant continues by listing the care Sarah needsas a result of these complex medical problems.

Extract 4b

. . . She requires a certain amount of medical intervention. She can’t chew and swallow normally so her main nutrition is through a gastrostomy but she needs feed to be offered you know smooth, like Rusks, stewed fruit to be offered at meal times, alongside finger food which sometimes she takes and pump feeds via her gastrostomy for her main meals and for snacks, and she’s fed through her gastrotomy of a night. So she’s on a fairly hefty regime. She has inhalers for her asthma and night-time antibiotics to prevent infection and she requires hearing aids for periods of time in the day. . . .

Here the consultant references Sarah as in need of particular sorts of care.In the next turn, he invokes the technologies of surveillance medicine, suchas the centile charts on which children’s growth and weight are plotted. Hisaccount uses the language of scientific/forensic neutrality and objectivityand is linguistically coded as fact/certainty.

Extract 4c

Now if you just look at this overall growth chart first, which is page 4 of your charts, you can see that she was born a couple of months early with her weight being on lowest centile, which is the first centile, and that she fell away from it. Now initially she had bowel surgery so we could understand that her weight gain wouldn’t be that good, she had heart surgery half way through the first year of life but there has been a



marked deterioration. Well a deterioration at six months, and a marked deterioration at about a year, then effectively after the three months or even four months after the first year of life she really didn’t put on significant weight. So, the bit between the two arrows that looks a muddle on the chart. If you turn over to the next page, I’ve blown the centile up so that the line you can see going through the circles is the third centile. That’s the one across the top, the weight’s on the left axis and the dates across the bottom. The bits highlighted in pink refer to the hospital admissions. The first admission had the most dramatic weight gain, but she was ill at that time with diabetes so a considerable amount of that would have been because of that. So say one kilo of that or the first little rise would have been the fluid, but there does seem to be a pattern of rapid weight gain in hospital and a tendency to plateau or lose weight on going home. The distance from the third centile, we’d got her on the 6th August, we’d got her really approaching the third centile as near as she’d been to the third centile for a long time. If you look back she was back to where she was at three months of age and we’ve lost the distance from the third centile since. So . . . these weight gains are quite . . . I mean this is a 3lb weight gain . . . I mean she was 8 kilos and she’s gone up to 8.8 which is getting on for 2 pounds in weight and she’s been in hospital a week. You must remember that some of the difficulties with the weight will depend on when she’s being weighed in relation to her feeds because she does have bolus of feed, so if it’s after a bolus she will weigh more.

Referenced here is the forensic work of the consultant, both in ensuring thechild is weighed at the same time in relation to her feeds and in annotatingand highlighting the various artefacts so that their salient features arerecognisable to a mixed professional audience. Throughout this account,the consultant presents potential alternative readings of the periods ofweight gain and weight loss, demonstrating that all things have been properlyconsidered.

This is followed by a summary of the formulation so far, invoking thelegal concepts of ‘avoidable impairment’ and ‘significant harm’ importeddirectly from the Children Act 1989. This achieves the construction of thecase as multi-agency business, and relies on the paediatrician’s categoryentitlement to adjudicate on ‘significant harm’ in sick children.

Extract 4d

Then I basically go on to say in view of these experiences with Sarah’s weight our concern that Sarah could be doing significantly better and that her growth and development are be avoidably impaired

i.e.

she’s suffering significant harm. A significant, prolonged improvement in weight gain would also lead to an improvement in height and head circumference which would enable Sarah to consolidate her development.

422 Susan White


This formulation is supported in the next extract by characterisations ofSarah’s mother. This is a potentially contentious issue, since caring for achild with this range of complex medical needs may reasonably be expectedto provoke professional sympathy. Here, the consultant invokes his status aseye witness ‘I have observed the following . . .’ and the account is linguistic-ally coded as fact not opinion – ‘the mother concentrates on the medicalisa-tion of all Sarah’s care . . .’.

To a lay reader this may seem a rather strange statement, since much ofSarah’s care is self-evidently medical. However, this is the first stage of aprocess of argumentation designed to persuade the audience that this is acase of, or has features associated with, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy(

e.g.

Meadow 1980, 1985), which is the production by a parent or carer offactitious illness in a child, or exaggeration/exacerbation of an existingcondition. Use of ironicisation such as ‘she went on about . . .’ and accountsof the mother’s questions about the consultant’s expertise serve to signal thatthis mother is a ‘troublesome patient by proxy’.

Extract 4e

I have also observed the following. The mother concentrates on the medicalisation of all Sarah’s care. When she first presented, she went on about all the nine consultants she was under, the number of medical problems that she had, that she was very difficult to manage that no one would be able to manage her medically and questioned us as to how many children with [ ] Syndrome I’ve managed and that they were totally unpredictable. She appears to have a very negative outlook for Sarah, she wasn’t going to grow, she wasn’t going to develop, she was going to go to a special school and her husband hadn’t really taken any of this on board. . . . Her mother has also said that if Sarah puts on weight it will put a strain on her heart and she will die of heart strain, I’ve reassured her that that’s not true and if she doesn’t put weight on she won’t do lots of other things. She’s convinced that there is more and more wrong with Sarah and to a certain extent there is something in that. I mean she has developed diabetes and we also think there is another metabolic problem to do with how she handles protein which might make her more prone to sickness episodes, but in reality that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

The formulation of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy also requires the con-sultant to establish that Sarah’s medical problems are not the cause of theweight problems and this involves a degree of minimisation in response to aquestion from the social work team leader.

Extract 4f

T.L.: What about her heart problem, has that been resolved?Cons: She had two holes that she’s had closed and she has a trivial leak

in one valve that is probably not of any consequence but it needs



monitoring. Her kidney problems should be resolved by the age of five, she’s got asthma which a lot of children have, she’s got diabetes which is in remission now and may stay in remission for a number of years. . . . her main problem is the gastrotomy and the feeding and her co-ordination but then it’s difficult to know how far that could be brought on with perseverance with offering appropriate food.

Here, the leak is defined ‘trivial’, the kidney problems ‘resolved’, the diabetes‘in remission’ the asthma as something ‘a lot of children have’. The mainproblem is feeding – recognisable to the audience as a normal trouble ofchildhood with which parents may reasonably be expected to deal. Furthercharacter work completes the formulation.

Extract 4g

Cons: . . . I don’t personally believe that the maternal instinct, or whatever-. To have a child in the house of Sarah’s age, not be able to feed her and not have any feelings of need to feed her. Most parents would not be able to tolerate that. They would be force-feeding the child, they would be beside themselves with worry about her not eating and there’s none of that. She could go through a day and she would have 50 mls which is less than two oz of feed in a whole day and she would not be anxious about her. And if someone is at that level of dysfunction for whatever reason, I mean I don’t know if there are elements of, if you think of the Mary Eminson scale of illness perception you know from neglect to the frank Munchausen, I would see her as scoring fairly high. I’m not sure if she’s in the neglect end, which is where a lot of the failure to thrives are, I think she’s more the excess perception end, making a problem end. She’s sort of creating situations if you like.

Here the ‘voice of journal science’ (Atkinson 1995: 143) (the Mary Eminsonscale) and category entitlement of the consultant to adjudicate on goodenough parenting combine to produce a powerful case. Noteworthy also isthe use of contrast structures (Smith 1978), the first half of which set up anexpectation of proper behaviour and the second a deviation from it. The quoteabove – ‘Most parents would not be able to tolerate that . . . and she wouldnot be anxious about her’ – is an example of this. These devices also referencedeviation from category bound obligations and expectations of parenthood.

There are clearly alternative ways in which this case may have been told.For example, Sarah’s medical needs could have remained the primary for-mulation and the mother’s reactions constructed as ‘understandable in thecircumstances’. The consultant’s particular telling relies on his strategiesof argumentation and persuasion, considerable behind-the-scenes forensic

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detective work on the part of the consultant and nurses, an audience with ashared professional understanding of ‘significant harm’ and the categoryentitlement of the consultant paediatrician to authorise the bracketing ofSarah’s medical problems. The formulation depends not only on centilecharts and scales, but on the working up of a convincing characterisation ofthe mother, and on the availability of the nosological category, MunchausenSyndrome by Proxy. In the meeting, all these warrants are treated with equalevidential weight. The paediatrician’s turns are followed by detailed accountsgiven by nursing staff of the mother’s behaviour on the ward and of Sarah’spresentation on various admissions. There is some discussion about whetherfurther work is necessary to gather more evidence, or whether the caseshould be taken into the formal child protection system. The team leadersummarises this discussion as follows:

Extract 4h

T.L.: To use case conferencing positively, which is the way it should be used, you would go in and say this is the purpose of the case conference to bring everyone together, to get consent and plan. If you do it that way, you can use the case conference. If you intend to plan and then say go, we’ll go to conference, it’s usually like a punishment which it’s not because it’s there to provide support . . . But, in a way, the last meeting you had before they went home was a support package, in a way you know.

Cons: That’s how I feel, I offered [local support service]. We reinforced the feeding We reinforced the hearing aids and there’s not really any evidence that any of that has been taken to fruition and OK it was a low-key planning meeting, but nevertheless the elements were there. The health visitor was there, the CDC [Child Development Centre] staff were there, the hearing support teacher was there, Mandy [home care nurse] was there, [local support service] were involved. We bent over backwards to try and listen and sort things out for her.

T.L.: The other thing that the case conference will serve to ensure is that social work should undertake an assessment of the family situation which is what you need as well.

Cons: Well, I think that’s what we need mostly, because. . . . Sarah’s mother, in my view, has major problems and I’m not really sure what the nature of these problems is, and how treatable those problems are and how much this is personality that won’t change and how much this is a protective mechanism from the desperate situation that she thinks she’s in.

Here, the team leader and consultant are arguing the case together. Theteam leader’s first utterance draws on her knowledge that, in order to justifytaking a case to conference, it must be demonstrated that ‘family support’



has failed, or that the level of risk is too great to attempt such an activity.However, it is not delivered as a challenge to the consultant’s reading, butas a ready-made rationale for taking the child protection route. The list of‘tried and failed’ interventions given in response by the consultant reinforcesthe argument in favour of a child protection intervention. The allusion tothe mitigatory potential of the mother’s psychological problems is deliveredironically – ‘and how much this is a protective mechanism from the desper-ate situation that she

thinks

she’s in’. The end of the meeting is devoted to planning the encounter with Sarah’s

parents and how the team leader may best be involved in this.

Extract 4i

T.L.: I think that either myself or Kay [ job-share team leader] can come in towards the end of the interview and meet the parents. I don’t mind which it is, to do the whole interview, or half of it, or come in at the end, whatever you decide.

Cons: I’ll see when they can come in. I would perhaps like to start it off myself and say, ‘look I’ve been assessing the situation, I know we’ve found these bits, but this is the reality and clearly things are happening at home that aren’t doing her as well as those that happen in hospital and that has to change’. Then, if you could be around to take on the planning bit and the idea of a support package, but through a case conference. I’ll bring that up as well.

This was precisely the way the case was managed after the meeting, with theconcerns presented to the parents and a case conference held shortly after-wards. The potential for backstage discussions to provide opportunities forthis kind of rehearsal collapses the common distinction drawn betweenfrontstage (the doctor/patient encounter) and backstage (interprofessionaltalk). The backstage and frontstage are not insulated, mutually exclusivezones of activity. Backstage most definitely affects frontstage activity andvice versa (Sarangi and Roberts 1999). The backstage provides a spacewhere professionals can shore up and contest their formulations of cases andoften rehearse their next encounters with patients and their families.

Contesting ‘not just medical’ readings

The analysis above shows how Sarah’s consultant produced a sophisticatedand persuasive case formulation, in what is potentially contestable territory,which in turn depended on his commitment and attention to detail in weigh-ing, measuring and recording. However, not all attempts to construct casesas ‘not just medical’ are so successful.

The following extract is taken from a meeting about a family with threechildren aged five, four and eight months, the eldest of whom (‘Paul’ in the

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transcript) has severe physical problems and learning disabilities for whichno diagnosis has been found. The meeting has been convened by the socialwork team leader in response to a number of concerns raised by the socialworker and other professionals about all three children who have poorweight gain and developmental problems. Present are the team leader, thefamily resource worker (FRW) from social services, who has been providingpractical help, the health visitor (HV) and the head teachers of the eldestchild’s school for children with disabilities and from the middle child’s school.The dietician and speech therapist have sent their apologies but have providedreports for the meeting. The consultant paediatrician is invited but is late.During the meeting the professionals, in the absence of the paediatrician,have together been building an argument that the children are failing todevelop appropriately due to less than adequate parenting. All professionalshave given accounts of the children being smelly, and of parents failing tofollow advice. The paediatrician eventually joins the meeting some 45 minuteslate. At this point, for the benefit of the paediatrician, the team leader sum-marises the case so far.

Extract 5a

T.L.: . . . Now we accept that Paul has special needs ehm and his attendance at [special school] has improved slightly, I would say it’s not sufficient well it’s not as much as we would’ve liked and we still think that his sort of ehm development may be being impaired by his parents’ lack of doing the things that they should for him . . . On the 4th of January it was 12.6 kg on 1 February it was 13.2, so there was a slight increase between January and February but he was having Pediasure to supplement his diet. We don’t think the children are being fed adequately and we don’t think they’re being stimulated adequately either but the other issue the thing that occurred at the planning meeting was they actually made a statement that they didn’t if they were concerned about feeding Paul too much because it would make him too heavy to carry upstairs ehm so obviously that was sort of put back to them that you know that wasn’t a good an acceptable reason for not feeding him, but we wondered whether he does attend [school] but he doesn’t attend regularly . . . We wondered whether you would perhaps have another look at him.

Cons: Well I can do yes, yes, you could say that he was failing to thrive and there is that way his weight creeps up and it was a bit higher in the first year, it has dropped off a bit through the second year in fact it’s crept up from the bottom centile, reasonably satisfactorily I would say-

HV: -but it’s probably due to the Pediasure that he’s having not to his-Cons: -I don’t know how Paul feeds, and whether he he’s, they obviously

feed him don’t they. . . . I don’t know well or how easy he is to feed.



FRW: Terrible apparently.Cons: Oh I imagine he’s very . . . FRW: I think he has everything pureedCons: Yeah, . . . I think given the parents’ limitations and . . . They find

it difficult to set time aside to feed him, I don’t know, but I think that might be one part. If he gains weight better on the Pediasure then I must say I think . . . I mean I find it very difficult to say whether he’s worse because of lack of stimulation than he would otherwise be. Whether he would be slightly better in a different family, who can know . . . Trouble is we don’t have a diagnosis for Paul, I thought I had but I haven’t ehm and he is waiting to see the geneticists to see if they have more ideas about ehm . . . I find this very difficult because here we are with a family who have a fairly handicapped child who appears to be getting by and is their parenting of that child good enough, I don’t know.

T.L.: Well I think that I think that’s why we’re here really because that’s what we’re not sure about. It’s not sure whether it is good enough or not whether it’s acceptable enough.

Cons: and how could we make it better for themT.L.: Well we’re trying to make it better. I think what we’re being faced

with is the resistance of the family to accept some of the supports that we’re putting, or even if even if they don’t totally resist it, they certainly make it very difficult for professionals to provide the sort of help.

In her first turn, the team leader delivers a somewhat faltering formulationwhich acknowledges some improvements, but argues that these are ‘notsufficient’. In the consultant’s first turn, we can see the powerful definitionalprivilege that paediatricians have in marking cases as ‘not just medical’. Hebegins by stating that there had been some failure to thrive, but that weighthas crept up ‘reasonably satisfactorily’. This is met by an immediate inter-jection from the health visitor who claims this as the success of Pediasure, afood supplement. Considerable character work in relation to the parents hadtaken place before the consultant arrived at the meeting. For example, therehad been a number of florid accounts of the children’s smelly condition andthe parents’ intellectual limitations and the team leader had also told themeeting about the mother’s traumatic childhood which she suggested mightwell be affecting her ability to parent. Yet, the consultant’s first few turnswere enough to destabilise what had, hitherto, been a very robust version.There is a recognisable moral struggle towards the end of the extract withthe consultant constructing the family as ‘in need of help’, which receives apowerful ‘tried but failed’ rebuttal by the team leader. The consultant’s ver-sion certainly did not return this case to a ‘just medical’ reading (indeed, sometime later a child protection case conference was held). However, it problem-atised the positions that the other speakers had taken and rendered further

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practical work necessary to ‘persuade’ the consultant that the child’s parentsand not his body were the problem. For example, arrangements were made forPaul to be fed at school so that the ‘difficult feeder’ hypothesis could be tested.

We can see in the data above that clinicians have a wide range of potentialrelevancies from which to choose when telling a case. Moreover, routinework in the hospital and clinics relies on this case-telling competency, whichcan deliver with brevity a clear signal to other professionals about what kindof case this is. The reading of the case is accompanied by sometimes subtleand sometimes quite overt warrants. These can range from the invocation ofknowledge of anatomy, physiology and pharmacology, through to judge-ments about parental love. It is worth examining in a little more detail theuse of normative warrants in medical work with children, as it is an aspectof professional sense-making fast becoming obscured by the plethora ofguidelines and policies associated with EBP.

Good patients/parents, bad patients/parents: invoking parental love

This study confirms and develops some previous findings. For example, itconfirms that children are a category exempt from classification as badpatients (Dingwall and Murray 1983). Whilst children or young people maysometimes be described as difficult, sensitive, challenging or damaged, thisis attributed either to their embodied condition (

e.g.

they have autism), totheir parents’ or carers’ (mis)management, or to some other aspect of theirbiography. This includes those children and young people whose behaviourbreaches moral codes, for example those who self-harm, or engage in beha-viour dangerous to others, and those whose chronological age places themvery close to adulthood. However, whilst Dingwall and Murray in theirstudy of an accident and emergency department found that moral judge-ment did not routinely pass to parents, this study confirms Strong’s (1979)earlier findings that, in the more holistic domain of paediatrics, normativejudgements about parents are a routine feature of the work. Yet, Stronglocates this ‘character work’ in the ‘backstage’ areas of the clinic and arguesthat, with notable exceptions, clinical encounters are conducted in a bureau-cratic format, concerned with the maintenance of distance, politeness andthe preservation of parents’ ‘face’. This study suggests something ratherdifferent. As the case of Sarah shows, moral judgements and character workbehind the scenes frequently affect the extent to which clinicians undertakeface work, or shift into an interrogative/pedagogic style in their encounterswith parents. The ascent of child protection practices in the last two decadeshas made its mark on the ceremonial order of the clinic. Whilst for most‘medical’ cases consultations follow the bureaucratic format identified byStrong, for cases which have shifted into the psychosocial and ‘not justmedical’ groups the encounter and case management are much more con-frontational (similar to Strong’s charity format). In fact, the imperative to



‘confront’ parents with the case formulation is frequently invoked in inter-professional talk.

There are two analytically separable, but overlapping, broad moral cat-egories to which parents may be assigned. They may be classified as good/bad parents and/or as good/bad patients (although in reality they arepatients by proxy only). This develops Dingwall and Murray’s (1983) typo-logy and also relates to Silverman’s (1987) and Strong’s (1979) work onpaediatric practices. Here, I have made use of Dingwall and Murray’s dis-tinction (derived from McHugh 1970) between theoretic (an agent respons-ible for their own behaviour) and pre-theoretic (an agent who lacks thecapacity to be responsible for their own behaviour) actors. Thus, a personmay be deemed a ‘bad parent’ because they are believed to have wilfullyneglected or deliberately abused their child, have put their own needs first,or have acted in an evasive and deceitful way. These parents are in thetheoretic category and almost always simultaneously defined as both badpatients and bad parents. Extract 4, the Sarah case, is an example of thiskind of formulation.

As Strong (1979) also noted, however, references to parents’ intellectuallimitations are common in paediatrics. Parents may be described as ‘not verybright’, hopeless or helpless. Parents so described may have mental healthproblems or learning disabilities. Whilst they may be seen as bad, or lessthan adequate parents, providing they are help-seeking and help-acceptingthey may avoid categorisation as bad patients. They are assigned to a pre-theoretic category and are not held morally culpable for their poor parent-ing, even when they are dealt with in the formal child protection system. So,whilst they are bad parents, they may still be ‘good patients’, who are grate-ful and can be helped. However, once parents breech the category-boundexpectations (of themselves as parents and as users of expert help) to acceptor follow advice, or do not ‘see the need to change’, they become potentiallyclassifiable as both bad parents and bad patients. It is precisely this kind ofmoral struggle that is taking place in Extract 5. There is consensus thatPaul’s parents have limitations for which they cannot be held responsible.They have learning disabilities and have endured traumatic childhoods (theyare pre-theoretic), the struggle relates to their willingness to accept help. Sothere is agreement that they are bad (or less than good) parents, but theirstatus as bad patients is still contestable.

I have argued that the ‘not just medical’ cases are particularly revealing.Here, the good parent/bad parent judgement may rely on an attention toforensic detail in the case, designed to uncover anomalies and inconsistenciesin the parent’s account, but it also depends very much on judgements aboutthe quality of parental love. Clinicians routinely invoke their ‘feelings’ aboutthe family, often developed and reinforced by story-telling. In the followingextract, a paediatrician is briefing a registrar about a family (the Kings)before an out-patient clinic. The consultant and registrar together work upa particular version of the parents, summarised by the consultant as follows:

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Extract 6aCons: Every tummy pain, there has to be a sort of, every time she cries

it must be her tummy. Although we showed that Infacol had no effect, didn’t make any difference on the unit at all, they’re really into the Infacol. Then, they’re into CONStipation because if she hasn’t pooed for so many hours then she’s CONStipated. That’s the problem, but having said that, just to fill you in Sue [directed to researcher], she has got a chromosome abnormality, so she isn’t a – she was very small and is abnormal and we haven’t got a clue what her outcome is going to be. It’s understandable that they’re having difficulty sorting out what is to do with her and what is to do with normal and you suggest things and in the end they do their own thing erm and it is really quite, quite hard work. So, so you’ll, you’ll have good time with them [to registrar].

By invoking their expertise and describing particular instances of the parentsmisunderstanding or disregarding medical advice, the doctors appear to beconstructing these parents as potentially blameworthy as both bad patientsand bad parents. In response to this, I make an ironic remark to the registrar‘Lucky you’. This is rapidly followed by a repair to my erroneous reading ofthe situation.

Extract 6bCons: No they’re very grateful and they’re not-Reg: Oh yeah they’re nice enough parents-Cons: They’re lovely, but they just need a lot of reassurance. . . .

These qualitative judgements are particularly interesting as the parents areclearly being classified as troublesome patients, but whilst perhaps ‘naive’they remain morally good parents. This contrasted sharply with the caseof Sarah above. Clearly the reference to gratitude is important and inkeeping with the findings of earlier work. However, the descriptions ofparental responses to the baby’s smile are also relevant and later in con-versation with me after the clinic, the consultant draws explicit contrastswith the ‘Sarah’ case:

Extract 6cCons: At least they’re [the King family] saying isn’t she lovely, have you

seen her smile, she’s pulling that funny face again d’ y’ knowSW: yeah mmmmCons: They’re like, ‘do you think that’s a little bit of chromosome 9’,

whereas the mother upstairs [on the ward] would be ‘well that’s [ ] Syndrome isn’t it, I mean look at her she’s got this that and the other’, not ‘isn’t she lovely she’s my daughter’.



In clinical practice, judgements about ‘appropriate affect’ form part of arepertoire of rationalities upon which clinicians draw in making sense ofcases. Despite their qualitative nature they are indispensable warrants forcertainty in case formulation.

Conclusion

It was noted at the beginning of this paper that current government policyin health care sponsors a version of evidence-based practice, which assumesthat clinical activity should properly rely on one specific form of rational-ity, which Harrison (1999) has named scientific-bureaucratic medicine:

Scientific-bureaucratic medicine . . . centres on the assumption that valid and reliable knowledge is mainly to be obtained from the accumulation of research conducted by experts according to strict scientific criteria . . . It further assumes that working clinicians are likely to be both too busy and insufficiently skilled to interpret and apply such knowledge for themselves, and therefore holds that professional practice should be influenced through the systematic aggregation by academic experts of research findings on a particular topic, and the distillation of such findings into protocols and guidelines which may then be communicated to practitioners with the expectation that practice will be improved (1999: 3).

So, this model is ‘scientific’ in the sense that it promises a secure knowledgebase which ostensibly provides a proper foundation for clinical decisions. Itis bureaucratic in the sense that knowledge is summarised, codified andmanualised through the use of protocols, guidelines and computer models,adherence to which may be monitored by managers, or through internal andexternal audit. This rationality fosters a view of knowledge as external to theclinician, and hence as insulated from the murkier domains of subjectivity,emotion and moral judgement.

This paper, however, has shown how much more complex are the formsof reasoning used by clinicians in a paediatric service when they try toestablish relations of causation. Shared understandings of patients and theirtroubles emerge out of interaction between clinicians. By examining howclinicians tell cases, we can see how science, seasoned professional ‘knowhow’ and moral judgement coexist as warrants for action. Moral judgementin this context is usually ‘affective’ judgement – it is warranted in informaltalk principally by invoking emotion – the clinician’s ‘feel’ for the family, orfor the appropriateness and/or inappropriateness of parental ‘affect’. Thereare no algorithms to help clinicians decide about the quality of love, butwithout these categorisations, much of the work of the clinic would be

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difficult or impossible. They are resolutely part of professional competenceand are dimensions that evade any analytic scrutiny in EBP.

The paper has argued that the stories clinicians tell have clear materialconsequences for the various parties to the case, including the cliniciansthemselves. For example, asking the questions and undertaking the work toshift a case to a ‘not just medical’ formulation (or failing to do so) is notwithout personal risk, as it often involves a breach of one of the principlesof mundane reasoning. There is a common-sense imperative to ‘call intoquestion only so much of the situation as is required for a socially support-able solution to the immediate problem in hand’ (Garfinkel 1967: 108). Inthe context of a paediatric clinic, the most common and self-evident explana-tion is often the child’s physical problems. Clinicians who raise concernsabout parenting may develop reputations for excessive zealotry or unneces-sary punitiveness, but those who fail to explore some social dimension tothe problem may (retrospectively) risk charges of naivety or collusion withparents. Obviously, this failure may also very directly expose children tofurther risk or abuse. It is for this reason that accounts of ‘not just medical’cases often start as ‘fragile stories’, that is they are defensively designed(Silverman 1998: 93), oriented to the need to persuade and to the possibilityof challenge. With repeated retellings, however, and/or through exposure toa receptive audience, they can quickly attain the quality of certainty. Indeed,once robust characterisations of parents have been accomplished, theybecome one of the principal warrants for certainty in case formulation. Thisis evidenced particularly clearly in Extracts 2, 3, 4 and 6.

For the families in psychosocial or ‘not just medical’ cases there are alsoa number of clear consequences. The amount of professional time, thenumber of professionals, the range of services involved and the amount oftime spent on co-ordinating activity increases as the zones of relevanceexpand outside the child’s body to include family and social relations. Oncethese zones are opened to professional scrutiny it is rare indeed for a case torevert to a purely medical formulation as more information usually breedscontinued concern. In these cases, the professional encounter with the familyalso shifts in focus and style, becoming more confrontational and inter-rogative, as clinicians address moral questions about the parents’ capacityfor change, or about the extent to which they have ‘taken responsibility’ forthe problem. This is illustrated in Extract 4 where clinicians are explicitlyrehearsing their subsequent meeting with Sarah’s parents.

The consequences for families of a psychosocial or ‘not just medical’ readingmay be both positive and negative. For example, Sarah’s name was sub-sequently placed on the register of children at risk and a formal child protectionplan instigated. This sustained the high levels of service provision, but alsoincreased surveillance and censure, and carried the implicit ultimate threatof removal of the child. This clearly may have kept Sarah safe, but it alsosilenced a potential alternative reading of Sarah’s mother as a distressed ordepressed parent who was struggling to care for her child and needed help,



but was not herself morally culpable for the predicament. On the other hard,it may have secured a safer, healthier future for Sarah.

It is not the purpose of this paper to adjudicate on the correctness ofdecision-making in relation to the cases presented. Rather, I have sought toillustrate the complexity and ambiguity of many presenting problems inchild health care. The protocols and procedures of scientific-bureaucraticrationality provide a poor fit with these ambiguities. In their clinical workwith such cases, professionals carve certainty from uncertainty, not so muchby consulting guidelines or protocols, as by engaging in artful rhetoric andpersuasion. In working up causal accounts with other professionals, clini-cians do not simply draw upon an external body of knowledge, rather theyare literally arguing the case. It is my contention that ethnographic studiessuch as this can fruitfully render visible these discursive aspects of multi-disciplinary clinical work which are taken-for-granted by practitioners, andhence may open these up for analysis and debate by clinicians, academicsand policy makers.

Address to correspondence: Susan White, Department of Applied Social Science,University of Manchester, Williamson Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL e-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, grantnumber R000 222892. I should like to thank the clinicians who allowed me access totheir daily work over such an extended period. I am unable to name those clinicianswhose contribution to this research was above and beyond the call of duty, but Iwould particularly like to thank R. and J. and P.T. who will know who they are andalso fondly to remember K, whom unfortunately I am no longer able to thank. I amalso grateful for the comments and suggestions given by the audiences at the ESRCseminar on clinical governance held at Leeds Health Authority in July 2001, andat the Orders of Ordinary Action conference, Manchester Metropolitan University,July 2001.

Notes

1 It should be noted that there is an ongoing debate within ethnomethodology andconversation analysis about the status of membership categorization analysis(MCA). I do not intend to go into that here, where I have used MCA pragmatic-ally, but hopefully fruitfully. However, for the purist or enthusiast I suggest Hes-ter and Eglin 1997, Silverman 1998 and Housley 2000.

2 Transcription Symbols[ ] overlapping talk( ) inaudible, and hence untranscribed, passage

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(0.8) pauses timed in tenths of second(.) audible short pausetalk italics indicate emphasisTALK upper case indicates loudness in comparison to surrounding talktal- abrupt end to utterance<slow> noticeable slowing of tempo of talk= latching of utterances

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