Distressed Medicine: COVID-19 and Healthcare's Futures

This talk asks: How do we relate to the work of healthcare? Years after COVID-19's emergence, the pandemic's social and structural effects on different healthcare worker cadres remain understudied. Faculty presenters will share material from a collaborative ethnographic study of the lives and labors of critical care workers in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU) from 2020-2022. As physicians and ethnographers of medicine, they will highlight the moral dilemmas and structural changes that shaped work in the ICU. Anchored in person-centered narratives, their analysis details transforming relationships to healthcare work, which they argue are transformations in medicine itself. Research Team: Harris Solomon, PhD, MPH Fred W. Shaffer Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health Peter Kussin, MD Professor of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Neelima Navuluri, MD, MPH Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Charles William Hargett, MD Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care