1st Edition
(Re)Thinking Violence in Health Care Settings A Critical Approach
This comprehensive volume explores various forms of violence in health care settings. Using a broad range of critical approaches in the field of anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, political philosophy and sociology, it examines violence following three definite yet interrelated streams: institutional and managerial violence against health care workers or patients; horizontal violence amongst health care providers and finally, patients' violence towards health care providers. Drawing together the latest research from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, (Re)Thinking Violence in Health Care Settings engages with the work of critical theorists such as Bourdieu, Butler, Foucault, Latour, and Zizek, amongst others, to address the issue of violence and theorise its workings in creative and controversial ways. As such, it will be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists with research expertise in health, medicine, violence and organisations, as well as to health care professionals.
Biography
Dave Holmes is Professor and University Research Chair in Forensic Nursing, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Canada and co-editor of both Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare and Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work. Trudy Rudge is Professor at Sydney Nursing School, University of Sydney, Australia, and co-editor of Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work. Amélie Perron is Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Canada.
'This is a work of unprecedented importance. This book exposes and examines violence that has been hidden - violence in health care settings. Even in the face of extensive exposure of violence in the home, workplace violence in health care has been carefully denied and left to fester as a dis-ease that infects all efforts to achieve quality in health care. Yet workplace violence in health care is all too familiar to health care providers and patients. It is embedded in institutional structures, and fed by high levels of stress and fear. As the authors acknowledge, everyone who enters the health care system is vulnerable as both a victim and a perpetrator. With new understandings of the dynamics of violence in health care, health care workers can begin to reverse the damage and turn the tide of accepted, dangerous and harmful patterns of behavior that can only be interpreted as violent. This book needs to be at the top of the list for any administrator, manager, teacher, clinician or practitioner, and patient advocate. It offers insight, hope and ultimately a path for healing to take place in health care.' Peggy L Chinn, University of Connecticut School of Nursing, USA and Editor, Advances in Nursing Science 'The overarching thrust of this challenging and coherent collection is that both health professionals and patients are subject to techniques of coercion, violence and control that permeate both the corporeal and the imaginary spaces of "care". The analyses reveal numerous disturbing institutionalised technologies of ideological, disciplinary and cultural power and surveillance that are elaborately deployed through managerialist rationalities or the apparently benign, humanist mask of "vocational" practice.' Anthony Pryce, City University, UK ’For most readers the phrase ’violence in healthcare settings’ would probably evoke images of disturbed, distraught or drunken patients and/or their relatives lashing out at health service workers. But, by its titl
