healthcare

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

March 30, 2026ISCHPblogLeave a comment

Written by Bella van Hattum and Tracy Morison

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.

Continue reading →

Abortion Accompaniment as Reproductive Justice: Rethinking Care on the Island of Ireland

January 30, 2026ISCHPblogLeave a comment

Written by Anna Theresa Schmid

What image comes to mind when you hear the word “abortion”? Maybe it’s a woman staring at a positive pregnancy test, devastated. Or someone walking through protestors toward a clinic, face hidden from cameras. Maybe a sterile doctor’s office – fluorescent lights, silence. All of these images have a common thread: it’s a bleak situation, where the person at the centre is utterly alone.

Moving away from individualistic understandings of abortion

Particularly in Western societies, we tend to understand abortion as a private issue and rarely think about it as a shared experience. The dominant view of healthcare, and abortion in particular, is a deeply individualised one, focused on personal responsibility and medical authority. Across other parts of the world, though, and especially in Latin America, communal practices of abortion care have a long tradition, recently also becoming more present in research. For example, feminist groups in the region have shown how abortion accompaniment enables self-managed abortion in restrictive settings, transforming abortion care to be rooted in empathy and solidarity (Belfrage, 2024; Larrea & Veldhuis, 2025).

Continue reading →

Puberty blockers: why politicians overriding doctors sets a dangerous precedent

December 12, 2025ISCHPblogLeave a comment

Written by Jaimie Veale, University of Waikato

This article has been republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, and with permission from the author.

This op-ed responds to recent developments in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the Government has overridden clinical guidance to restrict access to puberty blockers for transgender young people. Although the policy change is local, the issue it raises – political interference in evidence-based healthcare and the resulting psychological impacts on young people and their whānau – has global relevance. We are sharing it here as part of broader critical conversations in health psychology about equity, clinical autonomy, and the wellbeing of gender-diverse communities.

Continue reading →

Balancing Tools and Trust: Rethinking Child Safeguarding in Health Settings

April 23, 2025May 12, 2025ISCHPblogLeave a comment

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?

Continue reading →

5 hours in qualitative research

April 14, 2025ISCHPblogLeave a comment

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

A recent article published in Physiotherapy Theory & Practice found that US-based physical therapy programs allocate, on average, just five hours to teaching qualitative research.

The article by Michelle Wormley and a team of US-based academics, including the venerable Gail Jensen, reported on a descriptive qualitative study of time spent learning about qualitative research across 70 US physical therapy programs.

Continue reading →

eHealth, agency, and vulnerability in cancer: A reflection

October 8, 2024October 8, 2024ISCHPblogLeave a comment

Written by Esther de Jongh

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.^1-4Accelerated 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.

Continue reading →

Make Believe

August 5, 2024ISCHPblog1 Comment

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.

Continue reading →

Holding our mums…

July 17, 2024ISCHPblogLeave a comment

Written by: Cassandra Sundaraja

Giving birth to a child – bringing forth new life into the world – is an amazing feat a human body (with a uterus) is capable of achieving. It sounds so heroic and powerful. However, going through the process of labour and delivery in a hospital setting, I was struck by the stark contrast of how pregnant, labouring and post-partum women are made to feel instead – powerless and without agency.

Continue reading →

Towards peer-led and person-centred care

December 5, 2023December 7, 2023ISCHPblogLeave a comment

By Bella van Hattum

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.

Continue reading →

Weaving Together

November 10, 2023November 10, 2023ISCHPblogLeave a comment

By Brett Scholz

Nankeri nanggi / good day

During border closures in 2020, I remember feeling both more acutely unable to get anywhere I might want or need to be, and more in touch with where I was (very privileged to be on the largely COVID-free Ngunnawal and Ngambri country with lots of open space to get out and make the most of its beautiful surrounds). I was exhausted working to ensure that health care consumers could be the architects of the ICU triage process for the Australian Capital Territory during the pandemic. Something that gave me energy to get through this, and that helped me feel more connected to family and home beyond Ngunnawal and Ngambri country was trying to learn and engage more with Aboriginal languages. I have always been interested in language, and disappointed that I didn’t have any knowledge about Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri language despite having close ties to that part of the country. When I would email colleagues, friends, or family on Kaurna or Ngarrindjeri country, using local greetings and sign offs it helped me to feel like I was a little closer to them. When emailing others, I used Ngunnawal language greetings to locate myself to others.

Continue reading →

Book Review – Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives

August 25, 2023ISCHPblogLeave a comment

Written by: Heide Castañeda

London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-49043-7

This book offers a radical rethinking of the field by unsettling conventional ideas of mobility and borders to highlight the ways in which they produce health inequalities. Covering a wide range of topics, the text provides insight through a critical lens, and proposes areas for intervention along with an added emphasis on the need for future research to address the health inequities that affect migrants. It illustrates how a critical perspective can deepen our understanding of the relationship between migration and health, which remains a defining global issue of our century.

The text employs a critical approach to examine the structural conditions of inequality and larger historical and political processes, recognizing that exclusionary bordering practices increasingly occur away from physical points of entry. It posits the concept of migration as complex, tangled and multi-directional and underscores how migrant vulnerability can shape the lives of people in wider communities. Furthermore, it acknowledges diverse and intersectional standpoints, as well as shifting spatial and temporal influences. Chapters include coverage of health in transit; healthcare access and utilization; clinical encounters; communicable disease; labor and occupational health; gender and sexuality; immigration enforcement, detention, deportation; and the effects of forced displacement on refugee and asylum-seeker health.

Continue reading →

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

November 23, 2022ISCHPblogLeave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

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

May 30, 2022May 30, 2022ISCHPblogLeave a comment

By Tracy Morison

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.

Continue reading →

ISCHP

a global community of members interested in critical health psychology

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

Like this:

Abortion Accompaniment as Reproductive Justice: Rethinking Care on the Island of Ireland

Moving away from individualistic understandings of abortion

Like this:

Puberty blockers: why politicians overriding doctors sets a dangerous precedent

Like this:

Balancing Tools and Trust: Rethinking Child Safeguarding in Health Settings

Like this:

5 hours in qualitative research

Like this:

eHealth, agency, and vulnerability in cancer: A reflection

Like this:

Make Believe

Like this:

Holding our mums…

Like this:

Towards peer-led and person-centred care

Like this:

Weaving Together

Like this:

Book Review – Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives

Like this:

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

Like this:

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

Like this:

Follow the ISCHP blog via email

Share this:

Like this:

Moving away from individualistic understandings of abortion

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

By Alexis Paton, April 2021

Share this:

Like this: