Handbook of Social Justice in Loss and Grief (original) (raw)
Related papers
A student's lesson in healthcare disparities
Patient Experience Journal, 2020
This narrative was born out of a desire to examine the effects of healthcare disparities among minority populations. As a medical student, I had the opportunity to spend a 4-week rotation working with physicians specializing in palliative care during what is arguably the most challenging public health crisis in over a century. This provided a unique perspective that allowed the observation of the intersection of healthcare systems with underserved and vulnerable minority populations, and palliative medicine. It also allowed us to observe the negative consequences it has had, particularly during a hard-hitting global pandemic. The paper gives a brief introduction to the problem of healthcare disparities as described by the WHO and CDC. We discuss some of the statistical data that show how certain demographics like workers in service industries, or meat-packing facilities are more likely to contract the COVID-19 virus, and how these same populations are disproportionately affected by the pandemic due to their limited access to healthcare systems. We then discuss the case of a COVID-19 patient that was treated by a multidisciplinary team during this period. This patient, like many others, was an immigrant with limited proficiency in the English language, as well as a limited medical education. We provide details about his medical course during his admission, and we try to highlight some of the pitfalls in the healthcare system as it relates to this patient's prognosis and healthcare outcome.
12/90 259 Sociology of Medical Systems
2021
This course provides an interdisciplinary sociological and anthropological exploration of medical systems, with a special emphasis on Canadian healthcare. By adopting critical social science approaches to explore healthcare services and health, illness and well-being at individual and societal levels, students will gain an in-depth understanding of the social determinants of health, and the role played by medical systems in remedying or even worsening population health disparities and inequalities. The first half of the course explores the evolution and recent history of Canada’s medical systems, with attention paid to the development, policy and operations of Medicare. We will then discuss the contribution of religious healing and complementary and alternative medical systems for Canadians’ sense of wellbeing and their health and healing practices. The second half of the course will introduce and critically evaluate the beliefs that shape the social acceptability and provision of particular medical services, inform health decision-making, access and use, animate provider-patient interactions and treatment processes, and determine outcomes. In the area of medical systems research and theory, special attention will be paid to the social construction of health, illness and medical knowledge, biomedical hegemony and its effects for medical pluralism, and the hierarchies, politics and ethical challenges associated with medical service provision. Then, in order to emphasize the diverse ways that clinical medicine is subjectively understood and experienced, the course will draw on an innovative array of ethnographic studies of health, healing and healthcare systems, and those that prioritize patients’ and providers’ points of view in particular. With regard to patients’ navigation and experience of these same systems, the course will assess how the social determinants of health - such as how they concern economic standing, gender, ethnicity, and race - impact health at individual and societal levels. Efforts will also be made to identify the health inequities, deprivations and disadvantages that are over-distributed among and experienced by First Nations, Inuit and Métis, ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ communities. As importantly, the course will investigate how health beliefs, experiences, practices and even medical ethics are shaped and conveyed by culturally specific illness representations, treatment accounts, and narratives. Throughout the course, attention will be paid to the ways the aforementioned issues intersect with the COVID-19 pandemic.
A student\u27s lesson in healthcare disparities
2020
This narrative was born out of a desire to examine the effects of healthcare disparities among minority populations. As a medical student, I had the opportunity to spend a 4-week rotation working with physicians specializing in palliative care during what is arguably the most challenging public health crisis in over a century. This provided a unique perspective that allowed the observation of the intersection of healthcare systems with underserved and vulnerable minority populations, and palliative medicine. It also allowed us to observe the negative consequences it has had, particularly during a hard-hitting global pandemic. The paper gives a brief introduction to the problem of healthcare disparities as described by the WHO and CDC. We discuss some of the statistical data that show how certain demographics like workers in service industries, or meat-packing facilities are more likely to contract the COVID-19 virus, and how these same populations are disproportionately affected by ...
Omega: Journal of Death and Dying. Sage Publications Inc, 2019
In this article, I argue that a holistic strategy is needed to ascertain how implicit bias, on the part of health-care providers, and structural impediments work together to produce significant barriers to access to medical assistance in dying for marginalized groups-particularly those experiencing intersecting or interlocking forms of identity-based oppressions. In doing so, I also make the case that this kind of primary, patient-centered, and institutional research could benefit from the insights of critical feminism and materialist feminist theory by highlighting and challenging inequalities, opening up debate, and exploring new forms of knowledge production. It also offers a way to shape future research of medical assistance in dying, as it relates specifically to the study of how overlapping forms of structural and interpersonal marginalization (e.g., implicit bias), inclusive of race, gender, class, ethnicity, dis/ability, sexuality, and so on are expressed and experienced.
Primary …, 2008
Rapidly changing demographics in the United States and diverse cultural beliefs impact hospice utilization and end-of-life care. Healthcare professionals and clinicians need a connecting framework to understand patients' and their family's perspectives regarding utilization of those services. This framework will assist healthcare workers in providing culturally sensitive and appropriate information to patients nearing the end of life, so that they and their loved ones can make informed decisions for optimal care during this passage of life. Considering the variables in this framework may also help facilitate communication between healthcare professionals and patients and reduce misunderstanding among the surviving family members.
Cycle of Illness: A Study of American Minorities Facing Chronic and Terminal Diseases
The infrastructure of the healthcare system in America contains disparities for many, as the nation forges forward to come to a unanimous solution to providing a sustainable healthcare system for all. Within this process, issues such as race, socioeconomic status, and culture become factors for disproportion. The researcher explores such factors within social stratification, race and culture. The research conducted in this paper identifies not only the lack of adequate healthcare for ethnic minorities but correlates between morbidity, comorbidity, and mortality rates among two of the most widely affected ethnic groups: African-Americans and (non-white) Hispanics. Healthcare provider racism contributes largely to inadequate care and further widens the gap of equitable healthcare within the vastly dichotomic social strata; wellness that is sustained by preventive measures and regular primary care visits therefore becomes elusive to those on the lower social strata – particularly for ethnic minorities. As a result, life-threatening illnesses become prevalent within marginalized groups. Research shows that lower-strata minorities suffer from morbidity, comorbidity, and mortality at a higher rate than any other group within American social strata. This social problem creates an increased need for specialty services such as palliative and end-of-life care for those that cannot afford them. The incongruence of adequate and affordable healthcare services within the parameters of race and socioeconomic status creates a discrepancy within preventative medicine and primary care, thus developing an increased demand for palliative and end-of-life care. The researcher concludes that healthcare discriminatory practices, a form of institutionalized racism, along with the costs of healthcare among the lower strata, factors into barriers to preventative measures and primary care, and offers recommendations to integrate palliative care across the continuum of chronic, life threatening illnesses - from early onset of disease to post-mortem care - as a fundamental element of healthcare for lower-strata minorities.
Reading My Mother's Care: On the fringes of a compassionate and empathetic ethic
This is exploratory writing and reflection of the data and documentation of my mother's health records which tracks her care by healthcare practitioners and professionals as a patient/customer/client with cancer. It is an attempt to make visible my difficulty with my mother's death read adjacent to my frustration with my mother's care and is written in a style that lends voice to the tension between "[c]lean and reasonable scholarship about messy, unreasonable experiences" (Tamas paragraph 18). It is also a reflection on what I experience as a tension between the importance and significance, on the one hand, of interprofessional collaboration, a model of health-care which recognizes the importance of a multi-disciplinary healthcare team as a best practice, and interprofessional collaborative care, a model of health-care which recognizes the importance of a multi-disciplinary healthcare team to foster patient-centred care. 1 Interprofessional Care is the provision of comprehensive health services to patients by multiple health care professionals who work collaboratively to deliver the best quality of care in every health care setting. It encompasses partnership, collaboration and a multi-disciplinary approach to enhancing care outcomes and is the cornerstone of the HealthForceOntario strategy (Interprofessional Care). Ceci est un texte exploratoire de ma mère à qui des professionnelles de la santé ont prodigué des soins alors qu'elle était atteinte du cancer. Récemment en apprentissage comme éducatrice en soins médicaux, j'ai réfléchi sur la tension qui existe entre la collaboration interprofessionnelle et les soins en collaboration avec les interprofessionnels durant la formation médicale et les réalités vécues chez les patientes. Must make a critical poetry, an analytic lyric, not a poetry that "decorates dominant culture'" (to cite Michael Palmer) but one which questions the discourses. This situation makes of representation a site of struggle. (DuPlessis 145) And listening to the patient is only now becoming a central focus for health and social care professions. (Freeth et al. x)