Medicine without Doctors: Reimagining Care and Voice Through Play

Medicine without doctors is now a possible and plausible future for healthcare. Already encroached upon by commercial and scientific stakeholders, doctors’ roles in the UK have recently changed dramatically. New technologies, patient activism, and economic upheaval draw power traditionally held by doctors. This project conceives of a future medicine without doctors as one of both promise and crisis; a perspective, in which different issues and approaches unexpectedly align. We will conduct four empirical analytical case-studies (abortion care, LGBQT+ health activism, autonomous systems, physician associates) to study how medicine without doctors is practiced, experienced, planned, despaired, or hoped. We utilise the sociology of care grounded in philosophy of voice to reimagine the future of care and explore whose voices come to matter across these disjointed sites. Methodologically anchored in speculative tools of play, we combine perspectives from history, law, ethics, sociology, and STS. We take an intellectual risk by moving beyond entrenched pathways to study the future of medicine through the lens of technoscience, social medicine, or economic optimisation. Instead, this project will construct a new field of research that centres matters of care for health which exceed medicalised frames and focusses on voices of medical reason beyond the doctor’s territory.