Introduction

In this book, we have so far looked at a number of different aspects of the role of consumption in shaping the identity and experience of later life in contemporary Britain. Here we focus on health and health-related consumption. This is a rather different entity from those considered in earlier chapters where we looked at the growth of access to material goods by older people. Clearly, goods such as washing machines, videos and computers need little explanation or justification as ‘consumption items’. They are material objects that have both a physical form and convey a variety (or myriad) of meanings about identity, aesthetics and the consumer's sense of self. However, consumption is not only limited to the arena of tangible goods, but is also concerned with services (both tangible and intangible), leisure pursuits and ‘lifestyles’. Gould and Gould (2001) argue that intangibles such as health, not just healthcare, as well as tangibles can be conceptualised as consumption goods. Hence the study of health consumption involves a broad spectrum of activity, including the provision (and consumption of) goods and services, the development of health-related lifestyles and the experience and distribution of ‘health’ within and between populations. We therefore can examine health (care) practices via the perspective of consumption as a means of understanding health inequalities within and between specific social groups.

This proposition of health as a consumption good is not without its problems, particularly when we consider the extent to which health is produced and maintained by individuals, groups and communities. However, in the context of the growth of consumerism and choice as dominant motifs in the development of health and welfare policy, it is important to consider the extent to which the construction of older people as citizen consumers is linked to an increasingly individualised pattern of consumption of health and healthcare (Gilleard and Higgs, 1998). As we will see in the next chapter, the National Health Service (NHS) has become increasingly dominated by notions of (quasi-) markets, competition between providers, the development of commissioning (purchasing of services) and the development of the voice of the consumer (previously users or patients).