Finding Meaning in Healthcare

Looking Through the Hermeneutic Window

Rupal Shah, Robert Clarke

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
29 August 2025

Social work; Psychology; Health psychology; Medical sociology; Psychotherapy

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.

Edited by: Rupal Shah, Robert Clarke
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 490g
ISBN: 9781032853246
ISBN 10: 1032853247
Pages: 162
Publication Date: 29 August 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Finding Meaning in Healthcare: Looking Through the Hermeneutic Window

“A timely book which argues that relationship based care is more important than ever at a time when health care is increasingly fragmented, taskified, deprofessionalised and digitised.” --Professor Trisha Greenhalgh, University of Oxford “An inspiring collection of essays that eloquently diagnoses the dis-ease afflicting contemporary healthcare. And 'Finding Meaning in Healthcare' goes beyond diagnosis to offer us the cure - an elegant framework which, applied to every consultation and clinical encounter, will transform the experience of both patients and the practitioners who care for them. Essential reading for anyone who has even an inkling that, for all the spectacular advances of medicine in the scientific era, the practice of healthcare has grievously lost its way.” --Dr Phil Whitaker, Medical Editor, New Statesman, and author of 'What Is a Doctor? - A GP's Prescription for the Future' “Much of general practice and primary care seems to be drowning in anxiety and despondency both for patients and professionals. This book provides some much-needed life rafts!” --Dr Iona Heath, Past President Royal College of General Practitioners.