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Women in the Netherlands with non-western migration backgrounds experience domestic violence at the intersection of culture and gender, and visit their general practitioners (GPs) with health concerns related to the violence. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with GPs, this paper illuminates how GPs navigate the process of decision-making around intervention in domestic violence, with particular attention to the role of autonomy. Patient autonomy is a core principle in Dutch general practice. The term refers to the principle that GPs must respect that competent adults can make autonomous decisions about the care they do and do not want, and that GPs must respect patients' views, choices, and ways of life. The interview data shows great variation in how GPs respond in situations of domestic violence against women with non-western migration backgrounds. Deploying 'somatechnics of perception', this paper explores how GPs' perceptions of their patients' autonomy are both the agent and effect of a complex and embodied negotiation of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, medical ethics, and morality. In highlighting how these patients' autonomy is rendered (un)intelligible and (il)legible in contextually specific ways, this paper sheds light on how GPs in the Netherlands can better assist women with non-western migration backgrounds who experience domestic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers matters of time in online mental health peer support. Significant evidence of the value of peer support exists, with new digital platforms emerging as part of the digitisation of mental health support. This paper draws from a project exploring the impact of digital platforms on peer support through interviews with users of a major UK-based online peer support platform. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of the 'living present', the paper highlights how notions of past, present and future operate as co-existing dimensions of the present. The analysis highlights how the immediacy of digital platforms elicits expectations of peer support being 'on tap', which creates challenges when support is not received synchronously. Unlike in-person support, digital platforms facilitate the archiving of support, which can (re)enter the present at any moment through asynchronous communication. Anticipations of the future feature as dimensions of the present in terms of feelings regarding when support may no longer be needed. The paper offers potential implications for social scientific understanding of digital peer support, which include valuable insight for mental health services designing and delivering digital peer support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been recognised as a serious health issue not only because of the immediate impacts at the time the injury occurs but even more so due to the longstanding impacts. Even though TBI is a globally recognised condition, the research is disproportionately focused on its incidence in, and immediate and long-term effects on men. A growing body of research suggests that generally, women who experience family violence are at high risk of TBI and suffer its impacts in ways that reflect gendered differences in the patterns and frequency of violence. In Australia, the social and physical costs of TBI are multiplied for Indigenous women, whose experience of disability and access to healthcare lies at the intersection of gender and race in the historical context of settler colonialism. The present study addresses the need for research into the sociodemographic inequalities that affect access to culturally appropriate hospital care, timely response systems, and flexible, safe and engaged social services. This paper draws on data from interviews and focus groups with Indigenous women, hospital staff and community-based service providers and suggests potential pathways for further research in settler-colonial settings elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the omnipresent yet analytically almost invisible role of memory and bodily experiences in childhood vaccination. Previous scholarship on the sociocultural aspects of vaccination has primarily focused on the individual and sociodemographic factors underpinning vaccine hesitancy, the role of healthcare professionals and the politicisation or mediatisation of vaccination. Social practices considering vaccination were primarily explored as a matter of the present. Only little consideration was given to the past, individual biographies and sociohistorical temporalities. To complement this body of work, we focus on cognitively-based, embodied and emotionally-experienced memory related to vaccination. Based on a qualitative study of childhood vaccination conducted in Czechia between 2017 and 2019 consisting of ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews and a document review, we identified three interconnected forms of vaccination memory: bio-immune, social-collective and lived experience. Bio-immune memory refers to the body's physical memory, gained to protect itself from diseases. Social-collective memory focuses on socially shared narratives about diseases and vaccination in the past. The memory of lived experience refers to feelings, embodied knowledge and pain. Our findings may inspire further analysis of childhood vaccination in other geographical contexts and amidst the reconfiguration of attitudes and newly established memories following the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incentivisation of general practitioners (GPs) by pharmaceutical companies is thought to affect prescribing practices, often not in patients' interest. Using a Bourdieusian lens, we examine the socially structured conditions that underpin exchanges between pharmaceutical companies and GPs in Pakistan. The analysis of qualitative interviews with 28 GPs and 13 pharmaceutical sales representatives (PSRs) shows that GPs, through prescribing medicines, met pharmaceutical sales targets in exchange for various incentives. We argue that these practices can be given meaning through the concept of 'field' – a social space in which GPs, PSRs, and pharmacists were hierarchically positioned, with their unique capacities, to enable healthcare provision. However, structural forces like the intense competition between pharmaceutical companies, the presence of unqualified healthcare providers in the healthcare market, and a lack of regulation by the state institutions produced a context that enabled pharmaceutical companies and GPs to use the healthcare field, also, as space to maximise profits. GPs believed the effort to maximise incomes and meet socially desired standards were two key factors that encouraged profit-led prescribing. We conclude that understanding the healthcare field is an important step toward developing governance practices that can address profit-led prescribing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recognition of the broader relational aspects of viral infections, family support is considered important when someone is diagnosed with a blood-borne virus (BBV), such as HIV, hepatitis C (HCV) and hepatitis B (HBV). However, families' own support needs are often not a priority in service provision within the BBV sector. In this article, we draw on qualitative interviews with 20 key informants working in various professional capacities in health, social policy, care and advocacy sectors in Australia, and explore their experiences and perspectives on family inclusivity in their services. Overall, key informants acknowledged the diversity of what constitutes family, and consistently viewed family engagement as beneficial to both diagnosed individuals and the wider familial networks affected by a diagnosis. However, prioritising individual care in support services presented barriers to engaging families, which are further complicated by the role of stigma in shaping the social realities of living with a BBV. Increasing understanding in service provision settings that serodiscordance can be a family experience has the potential to widen this analytic lens to consider the support needs of families in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social cohesion and socioeconomic status (SES) have been widely considered important factors influencing health services utilisation, but little is known about the association between social cohesion and health services utilisation across different SES groups. Based on a nationally representative survey, this study explores the influence of social cohesion on basic public health services utilisation in Chinese internal migrants at different SES levels. It is observed that objective and subjective cohesion forms have different effects on health record establishment and health education receipt. The positive effect of objective cohesion on health services utilisation is significantly larger than that of subjective cohesion, but two cohesion forms show similar effect sizes on health services utilisation among poor-SES migrants. With the promotion of SES, the effect size of objective cohesion gradually increases while that of subjective cohesion declines, showing a distribution of 'scissors gap'. For basic public health services utilisation, migrants not only have the agency to receive but are constrained by their SES. For migrants with poor SES, strong structural constraints hinder the utilisation of basic public health services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are numerous ways that researchers can creatively approach social research and translation. This article discusses elements from the first stages of a novel project that centres social research translation in the form of a public exhibition. 'Creative Approaches to Health Information Ecologies' is a project by a multidisciplinary research team in collaboration with an Australian health consumer organisation. The project uses creative workshop methods to explore how people learn, think, and feel about their bodies and health states, and brings attention to the significance of communities, places, spaces, objects, and other living things – the 'ecologies' of health information. It then builds on these insights to create an interactive exhibition of materials designed for public engagement. This reflexive article unpacks how this creative translation-centred collaboration contributed to the make-up of the project team, the project's research methods, and the process of making exhibition materials. We discuss what the research team learned from the process about creative collaboration, research-creation, and research translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By applying a posthuman perspective to the analysis of care for older people (COP), we analyse the agential cuts (together/apart) enacted by humans (mainly caregivers and older people) and more-than-humans (a camera intra-acting with other objects) whose agential entanglement configures and reconfigures the political economy of the caring apparatus. Our study identifies 'targeting', 'monitoring', and 'aligning' as interrelated caring practices, thus contributing to advance a posthuman understanding of welfare technology, and advancing a critical use of the possibilities enacted by technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]