The Care Apparatus and Healthcare Professionals at Work

This chapter focuses on the experiences of healthcare professionals (HCPs) working with prostate cancer patients in Sweden. The aim of the chapter is to examine how HCPs understand the impact prostate cancer treatment can have on patients and their senses of masculinity, sexuality, and intimate life, and how they communicated these issues with patients. The results show that HCPs sometimes felt unqualified to deal with issues concerning masculinity and sexuality, as such topics are viewed as partially outside the medical domain of their professions. Nonetheless, HCPs engaged in such conversations with patients and described how they tried to support them in reorienting their sense of masculinity. This usually meant attempting to disconnect masculinity from its close connection with sexual ableness and to change beliefs that penetrative sex is vital for sexual health and masculinity. These narratives of masculinity sometimes clashed with HCPs’ experiences of patient desires, however. Further, the chapter illustrates how HCPs bring their own personal understandings of masculinity into the rehabilitation process and into their communication with patients.