May-Lill Johansen

UiT The Arctic University of Norway · Department of Community Medicine

Background Caring for people with palliative care needs in their homes requires close collaboration within and between primary and hospital care. However, such close collaboration is often lacking. Transitions of care are potentially unsafe and distressing points in a patient trajectory. Few studies have explored the experiences of healthcare profe...

Objectives To explore medical students’ reflective essays about encounters with residents during preclinical nursing home placements. Design Dialogical narrative analysis aiming at how students characterise residents and construct identities in relation to them. Setting Medical students’ professional identity construction through storytelling has...

Objective: To explore how agenda navigation may be accomplished underway in consultations covering multiple topics, we identified and analyzed one GP's communicative strategies. Design, setting, and subjects: A qualitative observational case study with linguistic microanalysis of an exemplary consultation between a female patient with diabetes a...

Background: Despite significant developments in palliative care in recent decades, we still find important differences in access to and delivery of care in rural Norway. Objective: The aim of this study was to explore what healthcare professionals consider necessary to provide equality in care for palliative patients in rural areas. Methods: A...

Background Continuity of care is particularly important for patients with chronic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes (T2D). Continuity is shown to reduce overall health service utilization among people with diabetes, however, evidence about how it relates to the utilization of outpatient specialist services in Norway is lacking. The aim of this st...

Background: International variations in cancer outcomes persist and may be influenced by differences in the accessibility and organisation of cancer patient pathways. More evidence is needed to understand to what extent variations in the structure of primary care referral pathways for cancer investigation contribute to differences in the timelines...

Why do we read pathographies and why have they become so popular? These are the key questions in our paper. In answering these, we will introduce and discuss Rita Felski’s The Uses of Literature (2008) in connection to the American bestseller and Pulitzer prize finalist pathography When Breath Becomes Air (2016) by Paul Kalanithi. We chose Kalanith...

Context Experience‐based learning may contribute to confidence, competence and professional identity; early experiences may be particularly formative. This study explored how pre‐clinical students make sense of their participation in the provision of end‐of‐life care within community settings. Methods We performed dialogic narrative analysis on es...

Introduction: General practitioners (GPs) participate in a patient's cancer care to different extents at different times, from prevention and diagnosis to treatment and end-of-life care. Traditionally, the GP has had a minor role in cancer treatment. However, oncological and surgical services frequently delegate limited cancer treatment tasks to G...

Background: Generalists such as general practitioners and district nurses have been the main actors in community palliative care in Norway. Specialised oncology nurses with postgraduate palliative training are increasingly becoming involved. There is little research on their contribution. This study explores how general practitioners (GPs) and onc...

Context: Longitudinal integrated clerkships (LICs) represent a model of the structural redesign of clinical education that is growing in the USA, Canada, Australia and South Africa. By contrast with time-limited traditional block rotations, medical students in LICs provide comprehensive care of patients and populations in continuing learning relat...

The prevalence of depression is high and results in huge costs for society. Internet-based cognitive behavioural treatment (ICBT) has been suggested for use in primary care and has been shown to be more effective when combined with human support. However, non-completion rates remain a challenge. Current recommendations state that steps to improve p...

Only a few patients on a GP's list develop cancer each year. To find these cases in the jumble of presented problems is a challenge. To explore how general practitioners (GPs) come to think of cancer in a clinical encounter. Qualitative interviews with Norwegian GPs, who were invited to think back on consultations during which the thought of cancer...

An important part of GPs' work consists of attending to the everyday and existential conditions of human being. In these life world aspects, biomedicine is often not the relevant theory to guide the GP; nevertheless they are a part of GPs' professional domain. In cancer care, previous studies have shown that GPs with a biomedical perspective on med...

To explore GPs' own views on their role in cancer care. Qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews. Norwegian primary care. The stories of 14 GPs concerning 18 patients were analyzed for core content and abstracted into general ideas, to create a broader sense of the experienced professional role. The GPs claimed to have an important rol...

Clinical skills, like questioning and examining a patient, are developed gradually throughout the years of medical training. Basic skills should be mastered on graduation, but the teaching of skills in most medical schools is not systematic. We evaluated a pilot teaching project in a general practice (GP) skills laboratory. Students were randomised...