A citizen is a member of a community who, in principle, is in a position to help shape the shared life, direction and practices of that community. A civic culture is one that encourages and enables members to exercise the rights and duties of citizenship by fostering opportunities for individual and collective participation, including through critique, disagreement and shared deliberation. The idea of citizenship is typically applied to individuals’ roles within a nation state, but it can also be applied to organisational, regional or more local affiliations.3,4 |
Everyone who works in and is served by healthcare organisations can be a citizen both of those organisations and of surrounding communities. This is not to deny that in practice opportunities and capabilities to exercise citizenship will vary substantially. For example, healthcare professional identities may sometimes give individuals an unusual degree of power or status within an organisation or community, but often professionals may themselves be relatively powerless and anonymous but still able to make a contribution. Similarly, both professionals and patients can act as citizens within healthcare organisations although their potential contributions will likely reflect differences in power and influence arising from their other specific identities and roles. |
By necessity this is a brief simplified account which we believe is adequate for our purposes. There are competing models of citizenship and there are also important critiques that can be made of appeals to citizenship (eg as ways of indirectly controlling people or ‘off-loading’ responsibilities) but we leave these complications aside here.5 |