Heavy Feeling Light
When doing fieldwork at a health centre in Malmö in 2001 I met a workplace under pressure. The nursing staff described their work as unacceptable and they often used the word heavy when talking about their and the patients’ situation. This was due to an increasing part of patients with more complex or diffuse symptoms of illness. The patients did not speak the Swedish language and were often unemployed. The staff felt powerless in treating these patients and meant that they could not cure or help them with only medication. The staff believed that the health centre and the inhabitants of the catchment area were neglected in a structural political and economical context.
In 2006 I went back to the health centre that had undergone a reorganisation. Instead of using the word heavy, a new form of ease was part of the nursing staff’s description of their working situation. In the new organisation the patients had to take more responsibility for their own health. The nursing staff spent more time than before educating the patients in how to take care of their own illness and how to live healthy lives. There were no longer as many waiting patients in the waiting room and over all the patients had become more invisible at the health centre. The ease that the employees talked about when describing their new working situation corresponded to the new invisibility of the patients.
