The Gatekeeper and the Wizard: the Gatekeeper goes digital

The Gatekeeper was tired. She had spent years sorting out which ill people needed to see the Wizards up in the castle so as not to waste their fancy machines on people who did not have a disease. But now her gate was gone. Instead, endless pathways snaked up the hill. If you fitted on a pathway, up you went; if you didn’t, tough. Admittedly each pathway was exceptionally NICE, and each was still routed past her front door so she knew who was coming and going, but that couldn’t hide the fact that her professional role and diagnostic responsibilities were diminished. The Itinerant Sociologist, a down at heel soul who sometimes stopped by, said that these care pathways were a good example of a “regime of discipline” aimed at reducing professional variation. Or was that professional vocation? The Gatekeeper was so tired that she couldn’t remember.

In fact the whole gate thing was a bit retro now, and she no longer understood what her role was. Searching for answers, she had downloaded a fancy new epistemology app. It told her that gatekeeping had changed because the nature of knowledge had changed. The paper …