Distressed Work: Chronic Imperatives and Distress in Covid-19 Critical Care.
Abstract
This ethnographic study introduces the term "distressed work" to describe the emergence
of chronic frictions between moral imperatives for health care workers to keep working
and the dramatic increase in distress during the Covid-19 pandemic. Interviews and
observant participation conducted in a hospital intensive care unit during the Covid-19
pandemic reveal how health care workers connected job duties with extraordinary emotional,
physical, and moral burdens. We explore tensions between perceived obligations of
health care professionals and the structural contexts of work. Key findings cluster
around the moral imperatives of health care work and the distress that work engendered
as work spaces, senses of vocation, patient and family interactions, and end-of-life
care shifted. While the danger of working beyond limits has long been an ordinary
feature of health care work, it has now become a chronic crisis. Assessing this problem
in terms of distressed work and its structural contexts can better address effective,
worker-informed responses to current health care labor dilemmas.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26722Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1002/hast.1458Publication Info
Navuluri, Neelima; Solomon, Harris S; Hargett, Charles W; & Kussin, Peter S (2023). Distressed Work: Chronic Imperatives and Distress in Covid-19 Critical Care. The Hastings Center report, 53(1). pp. 33-45. 10.1002/hast.1458. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26722.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.
Collections
More Info
Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Charles William Hargett III
Assistant Professor of Medicine
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
Alphabetical list of authors with Scholars@Duke profiles.

Articles written by Duke faculty are made available through the campus open access policy. For more information see: Duke Open Access Policy
Rights for Collection: Scholarly Articles
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info