Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies & Health (CORTH), University of Sussex

Building Therapeutic Relationships Online

A one-day workshop, January 29^th, 2021

Call for Papers

National and international health policy documents suggest that digital health care, offers the potential to build more accessible and more informative as well as cost-effective health services. The covid-19 global pandemic has accelerated the implementation of online health services. But what is the quality of therapeutic relationships in the online provision of care? What qualitative indicators can be used to measure and evaluate this relationship? How can we build positive therapeutic relationships?

A King’s Fund report on measuring therapeutic relationships suggests that a positive therapeutic relationship, in this case with a general practitioner, might include ‘friendship, respect, commitment, affirmation, recognition, responsiveness, positive regard, empathy, trust, receptivity, alignment between the doctor’s agenda and that of the patient’s lifeworld, honesty, reflexivity, and an ongoing focus on care that embraces prevention, illness management, and rehabilitation’. 

The aim of the workshop is to explore the opportunities and challenges faced by online providers in instituting therapeutic services which deliver high quality of care in which patients have a positive experience of the delivery of care and the relationship with the provider. This relationship can be explored in any aspect of digital healthcare. Among the areas contributors might want to focus on are sexual health services which have been early adopters of digital health care possibly because digitally enabled care is particularly attractive to users where stigma is a barrier to service access. Online testing for sexually transmitted infections is now routine practice in many public health systems there are now services providing online contraception. 

A key conceptual approach to thinking about digital health services is as ‘assemblages’ between human and non-human actors. These might be in contexts of monitoring blood pressure, or mobile phone screen displays or contacts with health care professionals or people trying to access contraception or the working of screening algorithms.  We are interested in how the actors involved interact within time-bound periods, to deliver health care and which may or may not generate any of the elements of a positive therapeutic relationship as listed above.

The workshop engages with the following questions:

Should and could digital health care re-create traditional therapeutic relationships?

What new learning comes from the attempt to do so?

How do assemblages of human and non-human actors enact this endeavour?