Finding Meaning in Healthcare: Looking Through the Hermeneutic Window

This pioneering book illustrates the ways in which an interpretive or hermeneutic stance can be incorporated into modern healthcare across clinical practice, clinical ethics, education and leadership – and the transformative effects of doing so.

Combining practical case studies and narrative, this book introduces the hermeneutic window, in which meaning making frames clinical and educational decision making. It shows how best practice requires more than clinical knowledge, communication skills and application of evidence based medicine. It is within the hermeneutic window that assumptions, meanings and values are examined, questioned and re-examined. Drawing on a wide range of expertise, the chapters challenge existing assumptions about the essence of healthcare and the role that clinicians play within it.

This book is valuable reading for all healthcare practitioners, particularly GPs, physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as professions allied to medicine, medical students and other trainees.

Rupal Shah is a GP and medical educator in London. She has published widely in the field of medical education, including Fighting for the Soul of General Practice – The Algorithm Will See You Now (2024) and the hermeneutic window series of articles.

Robert Clarke is a retired GP and medical educator who has a longstanding interest in evidence based medicine. He first co-formulated the hermeneutic window to demonstrate that biomedical and humanistic approaches are complementary and has collaborated with Rupal Shah and colleagues in arguing that meaning making is essential in healthcare.