Brilliant care: a conceptual argument for scholarship of the extraordinary

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.