health providers

Looking Beyond “Good” and “Bad” Care: Using Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis in the Emergency Department

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Written by Bella van Hattum and Tracy Morison

Photo by Feng Sun on Unsplash

Emergency Departments (EDs) are often the first point of care for people experiencing pain and/or bleeding (a threatened miscarriage) in early pregnancy. Many patients present at the ED not simply with physical symptoms, but also with an emotional emergency that encompasses the fear, uncertainty and moral significance of potential pregnancy loss. Their care needs extend well beyond biomedical assessment. From the perspective of emergency healthcare providers, a threatened miscarriage is generally a low clinical priority, even if a patient shows distress. This mismatch between patient and healthcare provider perspectives can create complex challenges for both parties in systems designed to prioritise acute, life-threatening risk. 

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Balancing Tools and Trust: Rethinking Child Safeguarding in Health Settings

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Written by Lauren Alexis

Image source: Alex Green from pexels.com

Globally, an estimated 400 million children under 5 experience psychological or physical abuse at home (UNICEF, 2024). Over the past 5 years in England alone, there have been almost 3000 serious incidents of harm and deaths to children, with many more going unreported. Most children were known to primary health services, yet only 1 in 11 were on a child protection plan at the time (Department for Education [DfE], 2024). With organisations’ efforts to improve early recognition of children at risk in health settings, are we actually sacrificing personalised, equitable care for standardised processes that overlook the complexities of families’ lives?

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eHealth, agency, and vulnerability in cancer: A reflection

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Written by Esther de Jongh

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash

Within the cancer survivorship domain, the use of exercise to reduce negative side effects of treatment is gradually becoming standard practice, resulting in a higher quality of life for many.1-4 Accelerated by the pandemic in 2019, the use of eHealth programs for supervised exercise (also known as telerehabilitation programs), whether experimental or standardized, has increased. eHealth programs have the potential to bypass obstacles that might prevent patients from exercising at a physical location, such as long distances and lack of time or (financial) resources.5-7 Reducing the equity gap in health care is one of the promises its online delivery hopes to fulfill: provision of exercise with online guidance can lower the threshold for those who lack know-how or resources to do so on their own accord, while staying in the familiarity of their own home. In this post I highlight the important role of the healthcare provider (HCP) in making these programs accessible to everyone. 

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When ‘we’ is more than two: families and infertility in India

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Written by Arushi Kothari and Parul Bansal

A child holds great value for individuals, couples, families and communities across the world. One only has to look at ancient art, literature, architecture to unpack the deep emotional and psychological significance that pregnancy, birth and parenthood has been imbued with across cultures. Thus childlessness, particularly due to infertility, has gained immense focus in the past 40 years, particularly with the arrival of advanced assistive reproductive technologies (ARTs). Within this complex interweb of medicine, desire and relationships, our work has focused on the experiences of low-income childless couples dealing with infertility in India. The narrative qualitative research involved in-depth interviews with 12 low-income couples seeking infertility treatment at a private IVF centre in New Delhi, India.

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Make Believe

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Some inspiration for ways to think differently about healthcare practice

Written by Dave Nicholls. Re-published with permission from ParaDoxa

Those of you who had followed the Critical Physio blog before ParaDoxa started will know that I teach a postgrad course for experienced health professionals. The course is designed to get them to think deeply and critically about themselves as professionals, their profession, and the myriad others they work with. Crucially, it’s designed to get them to think in unfamiliar ways about work that has, for some, become stale through familiarity.

As part of the assessment, they produce six artefacts that can be in any medium, any style or form, but they are especially encouraged to express themselves without words. Periodically I’d post up some images from the last course to showcase some of the creative things they have produced as inspiration for the times when we all feel a little blocked.

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Towards peer-led and person-centred care

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By Bella van Hattum

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

Ma te rongo, ka mohio;
Ma te mohio, ka marama;
Ma te marama, ka matau;
Ma te matau, ka ora.
Through listening comes awareness; through awareness comes understanding; through understanding comes knowledge; through knowledge comes life and well-being.

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Doctors often aren’t trained on the preventive health care needs of gender-diverse people – as a result, many patients don’t get the care they need

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By Jenna Sizemore

A blank piece of paper, black stethoscope and a black pen are all sitting on a light blue background.
Photo by Tara Winstead

Preventive health care – such as cancer screening – is a critical tool in the early detection of disease. Missed screening can result in a missed diagnosis, delayed treatment and reduced chances of survival.

But the medical system is poorly equipped to meet the needs of gender-diverse patients.

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Who Decides Women’s Best Interests? Examining patient-provider power relations in counselling on long-acting reversible contraception

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By Tracy Morison

Image by Pexels

Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) is widely accepted in most public health and family planning approaches. However, power imbalances between healthcare providers and patients make many women feel as though they are coerced into taking LARC. There is little research that considers the nature and quality of patient-provider interactions, including issues of power and women’s agency, as most scholarship in the field focuses on access. Concerns about the potential for coercion, lack of patient-centeredness, or uncritical LARC promotion are therefore under-explored, especially among ‘high-risk’ women who experience poor health and social outcomes. This study takes a much-needed look at how providers’ perspectives influence their recommendations to patients and the changes that must be implemented to help patients regain autonomy over their reproductive choices.

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