Working the boundaries of ‘whining’ – how patients and care professionals make sense of informal complaining practices

This study investigates informal complaining in healthcare settings, that is, the kind of patient complaints that are expressed verbally to professionals in care encounters. In healthcare policies and the complaints literature, informal complaints receive little attention and are rarely studied as a distinct phenomenon. Building on the sociology of complaint, research on the good and bad patient, and scholarship on boundary work, we analyse focus groups with care professionals and interviews with patients in Sweden to study how these actors make sense of patients' informal complaining practices. We highlight the discursive work that patients and care professionals do around the boundaries of ‘whining’ – our analytic term to capture informal complaining practices that are demarcated as to-be-avoided. We argue that there are three dimensions to this work: they negotiate the validity and temporality of complaining and do so in relation to an identity of the ‘complainer’. Our analysis highlights the complexities of these negotiations and shows how informal complaining oftentimes is framed as a risky practice by patients and a problem by care professionals. These normative complexities get muddled further through their contrast to healthcare political discourses which emphasise complaints as valuable knowledge and patients as active subjects. Our study suggests that it is necessary for future research, complaint policies, and person-centred care to engage with the difficult and at times unwanted parts of informal complaining practices.