Healthcare Unbound

Start: 2022

Healthcare unbound: A transnational perspective on the future of the world of work in health care

INVESTIGATORS

Prof. Dr. Susan Thieme, Dr. Sarah Hartmann, Dr. Christine Bigler, Dr. Sony KC

NEWS

PROJECT SUMMARY

The health sector in Switzerland shows the global trend of economization, oriented towards market-driven modes of governance. Cost-effectiveness started to dominate other, rather public, and common good-related criteria. The recruitment of health workers (e.g. doctors, nurses, midwives, technical staff) from abroad allows for shifting costs of medical education and training and circulations of knowledge and technologies to budgets of other countries. The outcome of this overemphasis on economic indicators is part of a more general tendency of the commodification of work, health and care-related knowledge and technologies and raises questions about capacities and capabilities for social, economic, ecological innovation, emancipation, and justice in search for more sustainable ‘work’. The effects of the increasing commodification trends on the quality of work as perceived by the main target group of a health institution – the patients – is also widely unknown.

Therefore, this research project addresses processes, actors and institutions related to the com-modification of work, health and care-related knowledge (incl. professional education and training) and technologies from a multi-scalar and translocal perspective. We aim at co-creating knowledge and contributing to debates about the future of the world of work in health care, based on inter- and transdisciplinary social learning among key actors of the health care system and us as researchers integrating media, art and digital technologies jointly with the mLAB.

To empirically capture those questions the research should take Switzerland as an entry point and remain open to the translocal linkages the research will reveal.

PUBLICATIONS

ASG thematic group Health & Wellbeing

INVESTIGATORS

Maaret Jokela-Pansini (University of Oxford) and Susan Thieme (Universität Bern)

PROJECT SUMMARY

Aim of the new thematic group Health & Wellbeing

In Switzerland, geographers conduct critical research on health-related issues, including healthcare workers’ experiences in different institutional settings, mobilities of care workers, assisted reproductive technologies of reproductive health, environmental health and pollution, and patients’ experiences of health and wellbeing, among others. Despite this pivotal subfield in human geography, there is a lack of spaces for geographers working on health and well-being-related issues to exchange knowledge and practices.

The new ASG thematic group Health and Wellbeing aims to bring together researchers in geography studying the different factors that influence health and wellbeing and produce injustices, and the practices and discourses different individuals and institutions use to act upon such injustices in a transformative way. In particular, we 1) promote transdisciplinary research stressing collaboration between different stakeholders, including researchers, artists, non-governmental actors, civil society, patients, and policymakers. In line with current global debates in health-related research in geography and beyond, we aim 2) to advance participatory research and engage participants in research processes. Such an approach also recognises that 3) collaborating across different disciplines is fundamental for understanding health inequalities and for formulating recommendations to overcome such inequalities.

Concretely, the thematic group will organise workshops, meetings and talks to address issues related to health and wellbeing and to connect people working along those topics.

Image: Dialog N