Category: health care

The Necropolitics of COVID-19: Will the COVID-19 pandemic reshape national healthcare systems?

The COVID-19 pandemic has made necropolitics – the politics of life and death – unavoidable . Drawing on the work of Achille Mbembe, Hamish Robertson and Joanne Travaglia argue that, as in previous crises, COVID-19 reveals many of the hidden assumptions underpinning national healthcare systems. As the current crisis continues to bring these assumptions into the mainstream … Continued

Why social science can help us to better understand organisational change in healthcare

Lorelei Jones, Alec Fraser, and Ellen Stewart write that while the literature of large‐scale healthcare reform is dominated by competing forms of knowledge, social science in particular can offer new insights. Major changes to the way clinical services are organised keep happening, despite a lack of evidence that it improves anything. Health services research often excludes important dimensions, such as politics and emotions, in favour […]

Opening the black box of clinical decision making: Interpretation is a central feature in evidence-based medicine.

How can different knowledge components, such as scientific evidence, clinical expertise, and patient preference, within the evidence-based medicine (EBM) framework be combined? Do trustworthy decisions fall out as clear-cut conclusions as part of an algorithm when an EBM approach is used? Eivind Engebretsen, Nina Køpke Vøllestad, Astrid Klopstad Wahl, Hilde Stendal Robinson and Kristin Heggen use the four stages of knowing presented by Bernhard […]