System-Wide Change in Cancer Care: Exploring Sensemaking, Sensegiving and Consent

This article explores the symbolic aspects of change agency on a learning platform designed to facilitate system-wide transformation in cancer care. A sensemaking-sensegiving perspective is adopted to analyse the construction of meaning amongst of the leader of a regional cancer centre, senior physicians and an action research team in relation to patient-centred care. The analysis suggests that the physicians, as change agents, made sense of the vision from three quite distinct discourses in relation to the development effort. We argue that although meanings reconstructed in development initiatives may well be far from shared, this by no means implies that they are dysfunctional.