Working (IT) out together: engaging the community in E-health developments for obesity management

Public health policy in Western countries increasingly emphasises citizens' personal responsibility for their own health. Strategies to encourage people to lessen their reliance on traditional forms of health care often involve new technologies that are intended to facilitate better access to health information and enable opportunities for self-care. 'Community-based' health care service delivery models have emerged hand-in-hand with discourses of 'patient-centred care', 'shared decision making', 'consumer health information' and patient 'autonomy' and 'empowerment'. In this book, contributors unpack these discourses and discuss their implications for relationships between patients and their health care providers, including the increasingly contested boundaries of medical 'expertize'. A distinctive contribution of this book is to bring together recent discussions about health 'consumerism' and self-care with developments in the sociology of work to make visible the restructuring of health-related labour, particularly emerging forms of health 'work' that are increasingly expected of private citizens.