Cyrille Mennessier

Composition of the Jury

Abstract

In 2019, lawmakers made “taking patients’ experiences into account” a full-fledged dimension of quality of care in healthcare organizations. This dissertation examines the mechanisms through which healthcare professionals develop a new collective focus on patients’ experiences within the operational aspects of patient care. However, building a “collective” focus faces various challenges related to the limitations of individual attentional resources, differences in perspectives among stakeholders, and intense competition among a large number of “objects of attention” in a given situation. It also examines how decision-makers develop a coherent focus on patients’ experiences across the organization, in tandem with that of frontline staff. By drawing on ideal-type mechanisms of attention in organizations and the Attention-Based View model, we explore how actors address these challenges. This study is based on an examination of the development of an “integrative” therapeutic practice—hypnosis—across various departments of a university hospital. It is based on approximately fifty interviews, field observation samples, and various reflection or practice-analysis workshops conducted as part of a research-intervention approach. The results highlight the existence of mechanisms of “collective support for attention” within the departments, operating in three modalities: a “strategic” modality, an “economic” modality, and an “ecological” modality .” They also highlight the role of a “community of practice” in disseminating the new practice and in integrating attention to patients’ experiences throughout the university hospital. This “professional pathway” for integrating attention into healthcare organizations reveals the importance of making consideration of patients’ experiences a genuine therapeutic concern.