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New Technologies in British Pharmacy Practice

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Emerging Health Technology

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Health Care Management and Economics ((BRIEFSHEALTHCARE))

Abstract

Despite its centrality to the patient illness trajectory, pharmacy is a fairly neglected area of research in the social sciences. Yet, community and hospital pharmacy are sectors in which innovative practices and technological artefacts regularly reshape and reorganise everyday work and relationships. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 practitioners from a variety of medical and scientific backgrounds, this chapter explores the ways in which various new pharmacy technologies are defined by both bureaucratic medicines management/pharmaceutical care policy and everyday working practices. It argues that pharmacy practice has been extensively reorganised around an increased clinical focus, in which new technologies have played a central role through two epistemic groups of innovations- technologies of clinical practice, and technologies enabling clinical practice. The ‘reflexive monitoring’ and ‘contextual integration’ constructs of May and Finch’s normalisation process theory (NPT) are used here as a framework for understanding the evaluative work which is carried out in everyday community and hospital pharmacy practice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of York, York, UK

    Kimberly Jamie

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  1. Kimberly Jamie
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Correspondence to Kimberly Jamie .

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  1. Department of Philosophy,, Linguistics, and Theory of, University of Gothenburg, Olof Wijksgatan 6, Gothenburg, 41255, Sweden

    Kristian Wasen

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Jamie, K. (2013). New Technologies in British Pharmacy Practice. In: Wasen, K. (eds) Emerging Health Technology. SpringerBriefs in Health Care Management and Economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32570-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32570-0_3

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