Crafting the Isolated Consulting Room: Practices of Independence and Collaboration of Finnish Primary Care GPs

Abstract

This study examines professional isolation in Finnish public primary healthcare and how general practitioners (GPs) craft their work in health centres and in the doctor's consulting room in particular. Consulting rooms are often places of isolation and loneliness but simultaneously arenas of independence and autonomy. The data consisted of 16 interviews of Finnish doctors, out of whom 13 worked in public health centres or were specialising in general practice at the time of the interview and three worked in hospitals. This study shows how institutional material-discursive practices that create the consulting room isolate the GP and how this generates feelings of loneliness, as well as how GPs aim to make the workplace more inhabitable through crafting themselves as independent and autonomous doctors or through crafting the environment to enable collaborative relationships. Through this kind of crafting, the GPs create professionally sustainable jobs and roles for themselves in the public primary healthcare organisation.