Sociology of Health & Illness

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This article explores the meanings and uses of a hospital corridor through 98 diary entries produced by the staff of an English specialist hospital during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Lefebvre's (1991, The production of space. Blackwell) threefold theorisation of space, corridors are seen as conceived, perceived and lived spaces, produced through and enabling the reconfiguration and reinterpretation of social interactions. The diaries depict two distinct versions of the central hospital corridor: its 'normal' operation prior to the pandemic when it was perceived as a social and symbolic space for collective sensemaking and the 'COVID-19 empty corridor' described as a haunting place that divided hospital staff along ostensibly new social and moral boundaries that impacted negatively on lived work experiences and staff relationships...

The need to grapple with hepatitis C-related stigma and discrimination in Australian health-care settings has been recognised in public policy, and work is underway to address it. But how likely are people to raise a complaint when they experience stigma or discrimination? And how effective and accessible are complaints mechanisms? Given complaint procedures are considered important parts of the delivery of safe and ethical health care, these are important questions that have yet to be substantially explored...

The neoliberal and biomedical 'good caregiver' discourse neglects the many facets of everyday information work that parents of children with special needs are required to do as they seek, receive and share information concerning their children's health and wellbeing. Along with time and skills, one such neglected facet is emotion work, the management of feelings in relation to societal norms. The purpose of this article is to explore emotion work, as a facet in parental health information work in the care and education sector, among mothers of neurodivergent children...

Health and illness identities have been presented as important for the experience of health and illness, and they are a widespread research interest. However, these identities are conceptualised in many different ways. This conceptual diversity calls for us to take stock of existing understandings of health and illness identities to provide conceptual clarity and reliability. The study performs an integrative review of these understandings in scientific articles identified through the databases PsychInfo, Pubmed and Scopus...

Workplace incivility is a pervasive complex problem within health care. Incivility manifests as subtle disrespectful behaviours, which seem inconsequential. However, evidence demonstrates that incivility can be harmful to targets and witnesses through negative emotions, poorer mental health, reduced job satisfaction, diminished performance and compromised patient care. It is unclear to what extent existing research critically explores how ethnicity, culture and racism influence how hospital staff experience incivility...

Conceptualisations of grief have transformed significantly in recent decades, from an experience accepted and expressed in community spaces to a diagnosable clinical phenomenon. Narratives of this transformation tend to focus on grief's relationship to major depression, or on recent nosological changes. This paper examines the possibility of a new narrative for medicalisation by grounding in the networks of language and power created around 'grief' through a critical discourse analysis of psy-discipline articles (n = 70) published between 1975 and 1995...

This paper intervenes in the dichotomous debate on the 'privatisation' of the UK's National Health Service (NHS). Whilst research suggests that involving private-sector actors and principles deviates from the founding aims of the NHS to deliver equitable healthcare for all, the opposing argument to 'keep our NHS public' also limits understanding and alternative possibilities. Through focusing on maintaining overarching structures, these campaigns fail to address everyday medical practices that have long been critiqued by those allied with the sociology of health and illness...

The proliferation of assisted dying legislative reforms globally is a significant change in the social and medico-legal landscape of end-of-life care. Understanding the impacts of these legislative reforms on family members who care for a dying person is vital, yet under-theorised in research. In this article, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 42 carers for a person who has sought assisted dying in Australia, and extending ideas of ontological choreography we explore the new and complex choreographies enacted by carers in their endeavour to arrange a 'good death' for the dying person...

Exoskeletal devices are new technologies that have been developed in the medical field to provide assistance and rehabilitation for persons with motor impairments. Among these impairments, spinal cord injury and stroke are the most common. Drawing on materials collected during multi-sited ethnography conducted in France, Germany and Switzerland from 2014 to 2019, I suggest that exoskeletons contribute to a more general process that I identify as 'aiming at the "proper" body'. As they materially craft motor impaired bodies but also are responsible for datafication and dataveillance, exoskeletons allow to categorise new aspects of 'risky' bodies...

Previous studies have found a solid correlation between payment problems and health, and a large body of literature has recognised the impact of debt burden on ill health. However, few have looked at the reversed causality-the impact of health on over-indebtedness and payment problems. In this article, we investigate whether or not a person with mental and physical health challenges is more likely to experience debt enforcement, and we take a step further to explore the role of health status on receiving debt settlement for those with severe payment problems...

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The engagement between markets and cultural hegemonies is shaped by the politics that promote or deny the emergence of fresh legitimations in response to the opportunities offered to consumers by new commodities. In the case of Islam and the assisted reproductive technology (ART) market, core cultural values concerning procreation, family and lineage come into direct conflict with the potential consumer demand generated by new ART technologies. Shaped by the character of multiple Islamic modernities and the authority structures of religion and state, it is the Shi'a-Sunni divide which most illuminates the politics of emergence driving the different Islamic responses to those cultural tensions...

Patient harm, patient safety and their governance have been ongoing concerns for policymakers, care providers and the public. In response to high rates of adverse events/medical errors, the World Health Organisation (WHO) advocated the use of surgical safety checklists (SSC) to improve safety in surgical care. Canadian health authorities subsequently made SSC use a mandatory organisational practice, with public reporting of safety indicators for compliance tied to pre-existing legislation and to reimbursements for surgical procedures...

Over recent decades, sickness absence due to common mental disorders has increased among young workers. The phenomenon is mostly understood on the basis of epidemiological research, and knowledge regarding the viewpoints of young workers themselves is lacking. Our study explored the explanations for mental health-related sickness absence in the narrative accounts of young workers in high-risk health and social care occupations. Semi-structured narrative interviews were conducted with 23 Finnish young workers (aged 21-34), with self-reported sickness absence related to common mental disorders over the previous year...

Diagnostic encounters can be seen as complex socio-material processes. Drawing on the new materialist ideas of Barad, we studied how an innovative technology became part of the intra-actions between different human and non-human materialities in a cervical cancer diagnostic process. While researching the development of a technology intended to improve cervical cancer detection, we carried out a series of observations of diagnostic encounters involving clinicians, patients and the device in a hospital. The intra-actions between the different materialities had rhythmic properties, repeated activities and timings that varied in intensity, for example, movements, exchanged looks, and talk that helped co-produce the diagnosis and maintain consent...

This article analyses a set of videos which featured public figures encouraging racially minoritised people in the UK to take the COVID-19 vaccine or get involved in related research. As racially targeted health communication has both potentially beneficial and problematic consequences, it is important to examine this uniquely high-profile case. Using a purposive sample of 10 videos, our thematic content analysis aimed to reveal how racially minoritised people were represented and the types of concerns about the vaccine that were expressed...

The state-level COVID-19 response in the United States necessitated collaboration between governor' offices, health departments and numerous other departments and outside experts. To gain insight into how health officials and experts contributed to advising on COVID-19 policies, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 individuals with a health specialisation who were involved in COVID-19 policymaking, taking place between February and December 2022. We found two diverging understandings of the role of health officials and experts in COVID-19 policymaking: the role of 'staying in the lane' of public health in terms of the information that they collected, their advocacy for policies and their area of expertise and the role of engaging in the balancing of multiple considerations, such as public health, feasibility and competing objectives (such as the economy) in the crafting of pandemic policy...

This article aims to advance knowledge related to the concept of the 'shame-blame complex' by analysing the accounts and experiences of parents with cognitively disabled children. It draws on 29 interviews with parents of children with Down syndrome and shadowing sessions with one family, carried out in Italy. Results show how the feeling of shame as a consequence of being associated with a disabled child is turned into blame for bad parenting. The sources of this blaming process are twofold: firstly, neoliberalism has disseminated an intensive parenting model based on the imperative of individual responsibility and risk avoidance...

In contemporary policy discourses, data are presented as key assets for improving health-care quality: policymakers want health care to become 'data driven'. In this article, we focus on a particular example of this ambition, namely a new Danish national quality development program for general practitioners (GPs) where doctors are placed in so-called 'clusters'. In these clusters, GPs are obliged to assess their own and colleagues' clinical quality with data derived from their own clinics-using comparisons, averages and benchmarks...