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Placing care: embodying architecture in hospital clinics for immigrant and refugee patients
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Placing care: embodying architecture in hospital clinics for immigrant and refugee patients

Susan E. Bell
Sociology of health & illness, v 40(2), pp 314-326
01 Feb 2018
PMID: 29464770
url
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12604View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Maybe Open Access (Publisher Bronze) Open

Abstract

Biomedical Social Sciences Life Sciences & Biomedicine Public, Environmental & Occupational Health Science & Technology Social Sciences, Biomedical Social Sciences Sociology
This article is part of a hospital ethnography that investigates healthcare architecture as an aspect of an increasingly large, complex, and urgent global health issue: caring for refugees and other immigrants. It argues that hospitals are nodes in transnational social networks of immigrant and refugee patients that form assemblages of human and non-human objects. These assemblages co-produce place-specific hospital care in different hospital spaces. Place-specific tensions and power dynamics arise when refugees and immigrants come into contact with these biomedical spaces. The argument is developed by analysing waiting rooms and exam rooms in two outpatient clinics in one US hospital. The article draws its analysis from 9 months of fieldwork in 2012 that included following 69 adult immigrant and refugee patients and observing their encounters with interpreters and clinic staff. Its inclusion of a transnational dimension for understanding place-specific hospital care adds conceptual and empirical depth to the study of how place matters in 21st century hospitals.

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20 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#3 Good Health and Well-Being
#11 Sustainable Cities and Communities

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Web of Science research areas
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Social Sciences, Biomedical
Sociology
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