Search

This paper draws attention to the health‐related work that disabled people do when engaging with rehabilitation services. Medical sociology has a rich history of looking at the 'illness work' that patients do, while disability studies scholars have explored the cultural value placed upon paid work and the effects on social status of being unable to work. Yet, a longstanding froideur between these two disciplines, which have fundamentally opposed ontologies of illness and disability, means that neither discipline has attended closely to the rehabilitation‐related work that disabled people do. The concept of 'adjusting' to illness highlights seemingly irreconcilable disciplinary differences. Yet this article argues that the notion of 'adjustment work' can elucidate the socio‐political character of the work disabled people do in their rehabilitation, which could create a more substantial and sustainable dialogue on this subject between disability studies and medical sociology. To make this case, we discuss interview data from the Rights‐based Rehabilitation project, which sought to explore disabled people's lived experiences of rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: While screening uptake is variable, many individuals feel they 'ought' to participate in screening programmes to aid the detection of conditions amenable to early treatment. Those not taking part in screening are often presented as either hindered by practical or social barriers or personally at fault. Why some people choose not to participate receives less consideration. Methods: We explored screening nonparticipation by examining the accounts of participants who chose not to participate in screening offered by a national research trial of atrial fibrillation (AF) screening in England (SAFER: Screening for Atrial Fibrillation with ECG to Reduce stroke). AF is a heart arrhythmia that increases in prevalence with age and increases the risk of stroke. Systematic screening for AF is not a nationally adopted programme within the United Kingdom; it provides a unique opportunity to explore screening nonparticipation outside of the norms and values attached to existing population‐based screening programmes. We interviewed people aged over 65 (n = 50) who declined an invitation from SAFER and analysed their accounts thematically. Results: Beyond practical reasons for nonparticipation, interviewees challenged the utility of identifying and managing AF earlier. Many questioned the benefits of screening at their age. The trial's presentation of the screening as research made it feel voluntary—something they could legitimately decline. Conclusion: Nonparticipants were not resistant to engaging in health‐promoting behaviours, uninformed about screening or unsupportive of its potential benefits. Instead, their consideration of the perceived necessity, legitimacy and utility of this screening shaped their decision not to take part. Patient or Public Contribution: The SAFER programme is guided by four patient and carer representatives. The representatives are embedded within the team (e.g., one is a co‐applicant, another sits on the programme steering committee) and by participating in regular meetings advise on all aspects of the design, management and delivery of the programme, including engaging with interpreting and disseminating the findings. For the qualitative workstream, we established a supplementary patient and public involvement group with whom we regularly consult about research design questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a detailed account of how surgeons perceived and used a device‐procedure that caused widespread patient harm: transvaginal mesh for the treatment of pelvic floor disorders in women. Drawing from interviews with 27 surgeons in Canada, the UK, the United States and France and observations of major international medical conferences in North America and Europe between 2015 and 2018, we describe the commercially driven array of operative variations in the use of transvaginal mesh and show that surgeons' understanding of their hands‐on, sensory experience with these variations is central to explaining patient harm. Surgeons often developed preferences for how to manage actual and anticipated dangers of transvaginal mesh procedures through embodied operative adjustments, but collectively the meaning of these preferences was fragmented, contested and deferred. We critically reflect on surgeons' understandings of their operative experience, including the view that such experience is not evidence. The harm in this case poses a challenge to some ways of thinking about uncertainty and errors in medical sociology, and calls for attention to a specific feature of surgical work: the extent and persistence of operative practices that elude classification as right or wrong but are still most certainly better and worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, U.K. universities have increasingly sought to involve publics in research as active participants in the construction of academic knowledge. Sociologists of health have largely welcomed this enthusiasm for engaged and participatory ways of working, including methodologies long in use in the field such as patient‐led research and co‐creation. Despite the strong interest in engaged research, however, we argue that funding patterns, bureaucratic structures and an overreliance on people employed on casual contracts make it extremely difficult, often impossible, to do engaged research in British universities. Drawing on our own experiences, we show how our attempts to practise and deepen accountability to variously situated publics were constrained by the way our institution imagined and materially supported engagement. We argue that it falls to individual researchers to mitigate or work around structural barriers to engagement, and that this process creates dilemmas of complicity. If engaged research is to fulfil its remit for inclusion and its radical potential, researchers need to think carefully about how the U.K. engagement agenda entwines with processes of casualisation, acceleration and projectification, and how institutional recuperations of engagement can undermine its political and epistemic objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to recent calls to further incorporate the study of animal health care into the sociology of health and illness. It focuses on a theme with a long tradition in medical sociology, namely clinical communication, but explores matters distinctive to veterinary practice. Drawing on video recordings of 60 consultations across three small animal veterinary clinics in the United Kingdom, we explore how clients and veterinarians (or "vets") fashion fleeting "coalitions of touch," that aptly position the animal to enable the performance of medical work, often in the face of physical resistance. Building on recent developments in the study of haptic sociality, we analyse how care and emotional concern for animal patients is communicated through various forms of embodied action; thus, how the problematics of forced care and restraint are mitigated through distinctive ways of touching and holding animal patients. Moreover, while prior studies of small animal veterinary work have highlighted the significance of talk within the clinician–animal–client triad, we reveal the fundamentally embodied and collaborative work of managing and controlling patients during sometimes intense and fast‐moving episodes of veterinary care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]