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The pandemic is not the great equalizer: front-line labor and rationing in COVID-19 critical care

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Date
2022-12-21
Authors
Navuluri, N
Solomon, HS
Hargett, CW
Kussin, PS
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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 article
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26352
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.5588/pha.22.0025
Publication 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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Scholars@Duke

Navuluri

Neelima Navuluri

Assistant Professor of Medicine
Solomon

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
Alphabetical list of authors with Scholars@Duke profiles.
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