Leading from the middle: Constrained realities of clinical leadership in healthcare organizations
This article reports on a qualitative, interview-based study of 23 staff in two UK operating theatre departments, mostly nurses by professional background, who were given formal leadership responsibilities by their hospitals and redesignated as ‘team leaders’ and ‘theatre co-ordinators’. While participants were familiar with leadership theory and could offer clear accounts of good leadership in practice, they were often limited in their ability to enact their leadership roles. Professional and managerial hierarchies constrained participants’ leadership capacity, and consequently the exercise o...
Source: Health: - June 17, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Martin, G. P., Waring, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
A confusion of tenses: Health screening and time
The article seeks to contribute to a re-evaluation of the role played by the contemporary health screen by exploring its relation to tense and time. Mobilizing data around operational aspects of screening for type 2 diabetes (T2D) alongside more general historical and conceptual perspectives, it challenges implicit assumptions that the screen represents either a momentary ‘cut’ in a longer process or a singular event with its own durational integrity. In contrast, the article argues, two distinct kinds of temporally related processes merge within any given screening episode. On one hand a rich heterogeneity of ...
Source: Health: - June 17, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Stronge, P. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Taking control: Complementary and alternative medicine in diabetes and cardiovascular disease management
The chronicity of chronic disease, and its associated uncertainties and fluctuations in health status, pain and/or discomfort, often leaves those so diagnosed feeling that they have lost control. Treatment can exacerbate this sense of loss of control, as people surrender to the expertise of their biomedical providers and interventions. In principle, self-management aims to return control to the individual, but its promotion is as much motivated by cost-containment as patient autonomy, and is advocated in an environment largely shaped by policy makers and biomedical providers. In this article, we examine how Australians wit...
Source: Health: - June 17, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Warren, N., Canaway, R., Unantenne, N., Manderson, L. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Book Review: Michael H Merson, Robert E Black and Anne J Mills (eds), Global Health: Diseases, Programs, Systems and Policies
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Source: Health: - April 4, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Regmi, K. Tags: Book Review Source Type: research
Bodies of knowledge: Nature, holism and women's plural health practices
The proliferation of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and women’s high level of engagement with these practices, has presented sociology with a range of questions regarding gender, embodiment and identity work in the context of contemporary medical pluralism. The current study, drawing on 60 qualitative interviews with women from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (ALSWH), examines how a group of Australian women negotiate CAM and biomedicine in a range of health and illness contexts. Selected from the mid-aged cohort of this national study, here we explore their accounts of engage...
Source: Health: - April 4, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Meurk, C., Broom, A., Adams, J., Sibbritt, D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
In pursuit of leanness: The management of appearance, affect and masculinities within a men's weight loss forum
In a somatic society which promotes visible, idealized forms of embodiment, men are increasingly being interpellated as image-conscious body-subjects. Some research suggests that men negotiate appearance issues in complex and varied ways, partly because image concerns are conventionally feminized. However, little research has considered how overweight men construct body projects in the context of weight loss, or how men talk to each other about weight management efforts. Since sources of information and support for overweight men are now provided online, including dedicated weight loss discussion forums, our analysis focus...
Source: Health: - April 4, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Bennett, E., Gough, B. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
From fatness to badness: The modern morality of obesity
This article reports on a small qualitative study of adults who fell into one or other of these categories in Norway in 2010, and who have been faced with decisions about lifestyle versus surgical remedies. This decision making is contextualized and the principal criteria examined. Embodiment, bodywork, self- and social identity, stigma, deviance and issues around the idea of personal responsibility and public health emerge as key themes. The concluding paragraphs commend incorporation of a macro- or social structural perspective to the conceptualization and investigation of obesity. (Source: Health:)
Source: Health: - April 4, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Gronning, I., Scambler, G., Tjora, A. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Parallel vigilance: Parents' dual focus following diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes mellitus in their young child
This article describes one part of a larger study of 55 outpatient consultations conducted within 14 months of the diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes mellitus in young children. Participants were parents and the specialist doctors, nurses, dieticians and social workers who oversee the child’s secondary care. Consultations were audio-recorded and transcribed. Our analysis draws on aspects of conversation analysis (CA) to investigate how parents’ talk enacts a growing confidence in the management of their child’s disease in the face of questioning from professionals. Analysis reveals how this talk distinguishes a...
Source: Health: - April 4, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Niedel, S., Traynor, M., McKee, M., Grey, M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Bodies completed: On the physical rehabilitation of lower limb amputees
This ethnographic study, based on empirical work carried out in an Israeli rehabilitation hospital, discusses the physical rehabilitation of lower limb amputees, during which body normalcy is re-constructed. Throughout the process, physiotherapists serve as social agents who teach pragmatic and discursive practices to manage the body as well as the prosthesis in the re-cultivation of body techniques. The findings, portraying four spheres of meaning, show that the mere use of prosthesis is insufficient since it stigmatizes the body as absent a limb. To avoid such stigmatization, the staff teach compensatory and discursive s...
Source: Health: - April 4, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Hoffman, M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Constructing the moral body: Self-care among older adults with multiple chronic conditions
Older adults are increasingly living with and managing multiple chronic conditions. The self-management of illness occurs in a social and political context in which the responsibility for health has shifted from the State to the individual, who is expected to be an active consumer of health care. Although there has been extensive investigation of the management of single chronic conditions, the realities of living with multiple morbidities have largely been ignored, particularly among older adults. Addressing this gap, our study entailed in-depth interviews with 35 older Canadian adults, aged 73 to 91, who had between thre...
Source: Health: - April 4, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Clarke, L. H., Bennett, E. V. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'I was so done in that I just recognized it very plainly, "You need to do something"': Men's narratives of struggle, distress and turning to meditation
Traditional masculinities can mean men are unable or unwilling to deal constructively with distress. However, researchers increasingly acknowledge that men and masculinities (including hegemonic styles) are diverse. Moreover, men can positively manage their well-being, although little research explores how they do so. Uniquely, our study sought to find men who report finding ways to care for themselves to examine narratives about how such self-care originated. We aimed to do this by exploring issues underpinning men’s journeys towards meditation, focusing on implications for well-being. In-depth interviews were condu...
Source: Health: - February 6, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Lomas, T., Cartwright, T., Edginton, T., Ridge, D. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'I just want to be normal': An analysis of discourses of normality among recovering heroin users
Research that has explored the lives of men and women recovering from heroin addiction has reported that users often claim that they ‘just want to be normal’. Working within a Foucauldian tradition, we argue in this article that the notions of ‘governmentality’ and the ‘norm’ are especially apposite to understanding the ubiquity of this aspiration. Here we focus not on the formal institutions of governance that encourage individuals to adhere to social, cultural and political norms, but rather seek to explore recovering users’ accounts of normality as they are envisaged and express...
Source: Health: - February 6, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Nettleton, S., Neale, J., Pickering, L. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Troubling stoicism: Sociocultural influences and applications to health and illness behaviour
In light of the ambiguity of meanings attributed to the concept of stoicism we critically explore its use as a label to explain and describe health and illness behaviour, juxtaposing the often negative portrayals of contemporary stoicism against its classical and philosophical origins. By reflecting critically on the term ‘stoicism’, its application and dimensionality, we show how the term has evolved from classical to contemporary times in relation to changing context, and explore different understandings of the term across medical and health literature. We attend to sociocultural factors that are seen to infl...
Source: Health: - February 6, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Moore, A., Grime, J., Campbell, P., Richardson, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
How 'alternative' is CAM? Rethinking conventional dichotomies between biomedicine and complementary/alternative medicine
The aim of this article is to interrogate the pervasive dichotomization of ‘conventional’ and ‘alternative’ therapies in popular, academic and medical literature. Specifically, I rethink the concepts such as holism, vitalism, spirituality, natural healing and individual responsibility for health care as taken-for-granted alternative ideologies. I explore how these ideologies are not necessarily ‘alternative’, but integral to the practice of clinical medicine as well as socially and culturally dominant values, norms and practices related to health and health care in Canada and elsewhere. ...
Source: Health: - February 6, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Ning, A. M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Medication communication during ward rounds on medical wards: Power relations and spatial practices
This article examines power relations and spatial practices surrounding medication communication between patients and health professionals including doctors, nurses and pharmacists during ward rounds. Data were collected in two medical wards of a metropolitan teaching hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Data collection methods involved participant observations, field interviews, video-recordings, together with individual and group reflexive interviews. A critical discourse analysis was undertaken to identify the location sites where power relations were reproduced or challenged in ward rounds. Findings demonstrated that trad...
Source: Health: - February 6, 2013 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Liu, W., Manias, E., Gerdtz, M. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
