The pandemic is not the great equalizer: front-line labor and rationing in COVID-19 critical care
Abstract
<jats:p><jats:bold>BACKGROUND:</jats:bold> Framed as “the great-equalizer,” the COVID-19
pandemic has intensified pressure to adapt critical care labor and resulted in rationing
by healthcare workers across the world.<jats:bold>OBJECTIVE:</jats:bold> To critically
investigate how hospital intensive care units
are critical sites of care labor and examine how rationing highlights key features
of healthcare labor and its inequalities.<jats:bold>METHODS:</jats:bold> A practice-oriented
ethnographic study was conducted in a United States academic ICU by a medical anthropologist
and medical intensivists with global
health expertise. The analysis drew on 57 in-depth interviews and 25 months of participant
observation between 2020 and 2021.<jats:bold>RESULTS:</jats:bold> Embodied labor constitutes
sites and practices of shortage or rationing along three domains: equipment and technology,
labor, and emotions and energy.
The resulting workers’ practices of adaptation and resilience point to a potentially
more robust global health labor politics based on seeing rationing as work.<jats:bold>CONCLUSION:</jats:bold>
Studies of pandemic rationing practices and critical care labor can disrupt too-simple
comparative narratives
of Global North/South divides. Further studies and efforts must address the toll of
healthcare labor.</jats:p>
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26352Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.5588/pha.22.0025Publication Info
Navuluri, N; Solomon, HS; Hargett, CW; & Kussin, PS (2022). The pandemic is not the great equalizer: front-line labor and rationing in COVID-19
critical care. Public Health Action, 12(4). pp. 186-190. 10.5588/pha.22.0025. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26352.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Peter Samuel Kussin
Professor of Medicine
The majority of my effort is devoted to clinical care of patients with advanced lung
disease and teaching. I spend four months a year in Eldoret Kenya working at Moi
Teaching and Referral Hospital as part of The Duke Hubert Yeargan Institute for Global
Health and AMPATH- a consortium of North American Medical Schools collaborating with
Moi University School of Medicine and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital. I work primarily
in the intensive care unit and medicine wards. I am involv
Neelima Navuluri
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Harris Scott Solomon
Fred W. Shaffer Associate Professor
As a medical anthropologist, I am interested in the dynamic relations between medicine
and everyday social and political life. My work is primarily based in urban India,
and I also conduct research in the US.
My most recent work is a book project, entitled Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma (Duke
University Press, 2022). Lifelines is an ethnographic study of road and railway injuries
and of trauma s
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