Patient advocacy as everyday activism: an ethnographic case study of local support groups in Northern England

Abstract This article explores how local patient support groups can function as sites of everyday activism within a neoliberal healthcare landscape. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with two Breathe Easy groups for individuals with chronic respiratory illness in North East England, the study examines how practices of care, peer support, and informal advocacy subtly challenge the structural marginalisation of chronically ill populations. While members do not explicitly identify as activists, their collective actions—from lobbying for local services to redistributing medical resources—demonstrate grassroots agency grounded in biosocial solidarity and relational care. Drawing on concepts such as biosociality, radical care, and everyday activism, the article shows how these groups redistribute epistemic authority not through protest, but through sustained, care-led micro-politics. Amidst austerity and healthcare reform, their efforts prefigure alternative models of community health governance and challenge dominant narratives of passive patienthood. Navigating insider–outsider roles, these groups create hybrid spaces of patient participation, community action, and informal health provision. The study offers a conceptual framework for understanding support groups as platforms for slow, collective activism operating through relational power. In doing so, it broadens understandings of activism, citizenship, and agency in the context of chronic illness and a restructuring welfare state.