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Swedish healthcare is governed by laws and policies that emphasise equitable access and treatment on equal terms. Recent directives increasingly promote person-centred care, urging practitioners to pay attention to diverse individual needs. Yet reports consistently show that healthcare that is culturally framed as ‘women’s healthcare’ – including both specialist and primary care – fails to meet such aims. Public debate highlights widespread dissatisfaction. What drives this discontent, and what does equitable access to care mean in such contexts?

This dissertation explores patient critiques of access to care within ‘women’s healthcare’, using material obtained through ethnographic interviews. Drawing on feminist phenomenology and patients’ narrated experiences, the analysis explores the norms and ideals that are conveyed through the patients’ accounts, focusing on what they articulated as barriers to access and what they perceived themselves to have been denied relative to their expectations of care. The analysis broadens understandings of healthcare encounters as cultural processes and of access to care from the standpoint of patients who were situated in individually experienced yet culturally shaped conditions.

The findings show that seeking care involved navigating norms concerning pain, patient positions, and clinical practice – that were shaped by cultural assumptions about femininity and women’s bodies, which were experienced as restricting access to adequate care. They also show how the patient critiques were themselves culturally formed, influenced by digital communities and broader societal ideals that emphasised knowledge exchange, mutual recognition, and the desire not only to be cared for but also to be cared about as complex, embodied subjects. The dissertation contributes to and nuances previous research on patient satisfaction, healthcare equality, person-centred care, and the meanings of access to care.