Exploring meanings of expert and expertise in patient engagement activities: A qualitative analysis of a pan-Canadian survey (6 March 2023)

Summary

This analysis is based on 446 qualitative responses to one target question: “Do you think the lived experience you bring to your patient partner role makes you an expert? Please explain in the box below”.

Through a discursive analysis of the comments, the authors explored the meanings ascribed to concepts of expert, expertise, and experience. Ultimately, they found nuanced and sometimes contradictory understandings. Thus, dilemmas of expertise in the patient engagement field may not be entirely about claims to specialised knowledge. Instead, discourses seem to be mobilised in response to the thorny, political question: “who is authorised to speak on behalf of patients”?

To meaningfully advance the conversation within patient engagement research and practice, the authors argue for more sociological and political understandings of forms of expertise, objects of expertise, and deployments of expert status in different kinds of knowledge spaces.