Brilliant care

Critiques of healthcare often focus on negative experiences to address gaps, issues, and problems. While important, this often obscures care that exceeds expectation - that is, brilliant care. This article centres brilliant care by considering the questions that might be asked to surface it, and what might happen when brilliant care is centred. Specifically, a conceptual understanding of brilliant care is extended within health sociology. In doing so, the article draws on Mol's research on the logic of care, Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory, and Hochschild's notion of emotion work. Through an application of this conceptual framework to secondary data - namely, reported stories of healthcare experiences from the series 'What's right in health care' - the article demonstrates how the framework surfaces and illuminates aspects of brilliance and its emergence. The article concludes by considering the implications this has on how we make sense of healthcare and the positive, social, and relational aspects that might be surfaced in current and future practices

Argument (complex analysis · Epistemology · Media studies · Political science · Project commissioning · Publishing · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Empathy and Medical Education · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

• The sociology of prescribing

  Open Access•A K Smith•Social Science & Medicine•2025

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• A modest article about brilliant care

  Open Access•Ann Dadich•Health Sociology Review•2025

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• The Managed Heart

  Arlie Russell Hochschild•Managed Heart•2012

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• The Logic of Care

  A Mol•Logic of Care•2008

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• Reflections on Positive Emotions and Upward Spirals

  Open Access•Barbara L Fredrickson, Thomas E Joiner et al.•Perspectives on Psychological…•2018

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• Generating Research Questions Through Problematization

  Mats Alvesson, J Sandberg•Academy of Management Review•2011

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• Positive Emotions Broaden and Build

  Barbara L Fredrickson•Advances in Experimental Social…•2013

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• The broaden–and–build theory of positive emotions

  Open Access•Barbara L Fredrickson, F A Huppert et al.•Philosophical Transactions of the…•2004

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• Prenatal Care Use Among Women of Low Income

  Open Access•Wendy Sword•Qualitative Health Research•2003

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• Personal strengths reported by people with chronic illness

  Open Access•Olöf Birna Kristjansdottir, Una Stenberg et al.•Health Expectations•2018

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• ‘It Was That ... Specialist ... That Finally Listened to Us ... That's Probably a Weird Answer to What You Were Expecting’

  Open Access•Ann Dadich, Simone Kaplun et al.•Health Expectations•2023

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• Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 19

  Gary Alan Fine, Leonard Berkowitz•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•1987

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• We’re Not All in This Together

  Lisa Bowleg•American Journal of Public Health•2020

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• Messages about brilliance undermine women's interest in educational and professional opportunities

  Open Access•Lin Bian, Sarah‐jane Leslie et al.•Journal of Experimental Social…•2018

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• Using Positive Organizational Scholarship in Healthcare and Video Reflexive Ethnography to Examine Positive Deviance to New Public Management in Healthcare

  Open Access•Ann Dadich, Remedios Roqueta Buj et al.•Qualitative Health Research•2018

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• Why do systems for responding to concerns and complaints so often fail patients, families and healthcare staff? A qualitative study

  Open Access•Graham P Martins, Sarah Chew et al.•Social Science & Medicine•2021

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• Brilliant or Bad

  Open Access•Michela Musto•American Sociological Review•2019

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