Hope and trust in diagnostic imaging contexts – Constituting technology and liminal patients

Introduction

This study investigates patients’ experience of selected imaging examinations and how human experiences are transformed through technological mediation.

Method

A qualitative study of patients' experiences during selected imaging examinations, centering on human-technology relations, was conducted.

Data was gathered in two Danish hospitals, through semi-structured interviews and participant observations. The study included fifteen diagnostic imaging examination cases, distributed over three Computed Tomography (CT)-guided lung biopsy interventions, seven conventional CT examinations, and five Positron Emission Tomography CT examinations. The participating patients were undergoing investigation for cancer within Fast Track Cancer Referral Programs (FTCRP).

The study has a philosophical approach to practice grounded in Postphenomenology and draws on anthropological studies of healthcare practice as its theoretical and analytical framework.

Results

Diagnostic imaging technologies were found to have existential implications creating hope and trust in patients. Patients demonstrated technological readiness, in their willingness to comply with examination criteria and the professional's instructions. The patient's primary concern was achieving a good examination result, for which they were prepared to push themselves beyond their usual limits.

Participating in diagnostic imaging examinations may be viewed as a life crisis ritual, wherein patients are constituted as liminal beings, existing between healthy and sick.

Conclusions

The existential implications of an imaging examination were clear in terms of hope and trust. Hope is related to life and death in two temporal perspectives: A future hope of surviving cancer and a present hope of being cancer-free. Hope was linked to avoiding despair and rested on trusting oneself to technology, thus, forming a circle of interrelated concepts.

Implications for practice

Professionals need to recognize the patients’ liminal passings yet, unnoticed transformative and existential implications, to perform better patient-centered care.