What are dually diagnosed patients’ problems represented to be in mental health? A WPR analysis of the multistability purpose of digital health records

Abstract

No previous studies have investigated how political measures, opinions and views of people with dual diagnoses, organisational requirements and professional values are purposefully communicated, mediated and/or integrated in digital records in mental health care. It remains unclear how health records function as both clinical vehicles for documentation, audit and quality assurance in patient care as well as political vehicles of power to articulate and reproduce idealised relations among actors and their roles in mental health. Informed by Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach, we consider how problems of dually diagnosed persons with co‐occurring mental health conditions and drug use (DDPs) are represented and how the tools required to fix the patients’ problems are communicated and legitimised in 10 digital health records consisting of 3830 pages of data. In the discussion, we distinguish their multiple purposes by discussing how their structure is shaped by broader discourses in health care. Then, we consider how the structure of records delineates professionals’ autonomy, discretionary action and service provision in ways that limit possibilities for including mental health patients’ experiences and exclude service users’ voices from care planning.