Inequality in Health Care - Empirical Studies about Health Care Professions

Many countries are experiencing increased insecurity due to climate change, warfare and a post-pandemic situation. We assume that unstable world situations would increase inequality in healthcare remain and are even sustained.

In this session, the critical sociology of Bourdieu will be applied to illustrate how current trends in healthcare entrench health inequalities. While social inequalities in health and social life have been documented in many studies around the Western world, inequality is usually defined by family socio-economic background and social class status. There has been less focus on the relationships that create and reproduce social inequality in health, or the way that tensions and struggles within the healthcare field participate in the shaping of inequality. At a time when corporatization and privatization of health care coexist or subsume traditional bases of public provision, we need new ways of explaining emergent structures of inequality. Papers in this session will draw on empirical work from a range of countries using Bourdieu to examine health inequality, with a particular focus on healthcare financing and care within institutions such as public and private hospitals, outpatient clinics, rehabilitation centres, and individual projects and investments towards health. The selected papers will highlight different approaches to the use of key concepts such as capital, habitus and field to strengthen the theoretical grasp on the mechanisms of daily production and reproduction of healthcare inequality.