- Title
- Multi-layered risk management in under-resourced antenatal clinics
- Creator
- Feltham-King, Tracey, Macleod, Catriona I
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298561
- Identifier
- vital:57716
- Identifier
- xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13698575.2019.1697432"
- Description
- In this article we contribute to critical risk approaches to studying pregnancy and childbirth in the global South. Following Sarah Rudrum’s work, our approach focusses on sociocultural inequalities amid the regulation of individuals. We draw on data from our Foucauldian-inspired ethnography of two antenatal clinics in an under-resourced area of South Africa to illustrate how multi-layered risk management operates in these spaces. These data were collected over a period of six months in the form of semi-structured interviews, observations of consultations and waiting room interactions, documents used in the clinic, and posters appearing on the clinic walls. Our findings show how a scientific-bureaucratic approach to pregnancy risk management, as encoded in international, national and institutional guidelines, is well known, highly visible, and practised through surveillance and reporting mechanisms in clinics. This approach incites healthcare practitioners to achieve particular performance standards and to monitor their professional agency. Managing pregnancy risk thus entails regulating the healthcare practitioners themselves. In implementing approved pregnancy risk management strategies in an over-subscribed and under-resourced public healthcare setting, however, healthcare practitioners face potential risk to their professional reputation and integrity. In managing this risk, they resist the scientific-bureaucratic approach through: depicting themselves as victims of unfair institutional arrangements or unreasonable patients; instituting street-level bureaucracy to control access to the clinics; and controlling patients’ actions in authoritarian ways. Our research shows that without engagement with the on-the-ground realities of the antenatal clinic in resource-poor environments, a scientific-bureaucratic approach to pregnancy risk management is inevitably limited in its effectiveness.
- Format
- computer, online resource, application/pdf, 1 online resource (22 pages), pdf
- Publisher
- Taylor and Francis Online
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Health, Risk and Society, Feltham-King, T. and Macleod, C., 2020. Multi-layered risk management in under-resourced antenatal clinics: a scientific-bureaucratic approach versus street-level bureaucracy. Health, Risk and Society, 22(1), pp.31-52, Health, Risk and Society volume 22 number 1 p. 31 2020 1469-8331
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Taylor and Francis Online Terms and Conditions Statement (https://www.tandfonline.com/terms-and-conditions)
- Rights
- Open Access
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Collections
Gender Action Forum (GENACT)
Feltham-King, Tracey (Prof)
SDG 05. Gender Equality
RU Department of Psychology
Macleod, Catriona Ida (Distinguished Professor)
RU DST/NRF SARChI for Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproductions Research (CSSR) Programme
SDG 10. Reduced Inequalities
SDG 03. Good Health and Well-Being
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | Multi-layered risk management in under-resourced antenatal clinics.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |