4.5 Gender and power Feminist writers have documented the ways in which inequalities based on gender are reflected and reproduced in health and social care services. Although the majority of workers in care services are women, men are over-represented in management and in positions of authority, and male-dominated professions, such as medicine, tend to exert more power than those, such as nursing, in which women are the majority. For example, whereas women make up 75% of the workforce in the NHS (Doyal, 1999), th
2.6 Reflecting on identity How would you describe your identity or identities? What kind of words would you use to describe yourself in terms of: Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: The content acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons licence). See Terms and Conditions. 4 Care ‘Care’ is a word which summons up positive and highly moral meanings for many people. It has associations with giving, sacrifice and feelings of empathy. However, Activity 1 suggests that things are not perhaps quite so straightforward. One way of understanding how and why there may be contrasting ideas of what care means is suggested by Joan Tronto, a social scientist. She has pointed out how care is both ‘universal’ and ‘particular’. She argues that caring is an activity which e 1 Crossing boundaries: a case study A number of situations put a strain on the idea that caring is just an extension of 'being ordinary'. These include times when people are giving intimate care. Since the normal rules do not apply in these circumstances, we have to develop a set of special rules to guide practice, thinking very carefully about the core question: 'How can boundaries be respected in situations where intimate care is being given?’' This question will be explored through a fictional case study set in a res 1.2.1 The Beveridge report The architect of much of this reform in the field of social welfare was William Beveridge. His report entitled ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ was compiled as the war was at its height (Beveridge, 1942). In it Beveridge set out a plan to put an end to what he called the ‘five giants’ – Want (today we would call it poverty), Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness (unemployment). The centrepiece was a state-run system of compulsory insurance. Every worker, by contribut Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Every effort has been made to trace all copyright owners, but if any has been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the nece 1.4.10 Unfinished business When people die suddenly we can never be sure that they have done and said what they want and are able to do. Meg’s long term-illness gave her a lot of time for reflection and preparation, so that while her death was sudden and she was unable to see her younger son, she also had the opportunity for conversations with people about her death. However, there may have been last-minute wishes that Meg was unable to express. Li’s sudden stroke may have left her with things unsaid, but her 1.3.9 Other common features In addition to these very common features there are in many accounts further distinctive elements. A sense of entering into or being met by light and/or an area of great beauty has been expressed in a significant number of accounts. Here are just two illustrations: I was just in a wonderful peace and wellness in a beautiful landscape setting of grass, lawns and trees and brilliant light. (Fenwick and Fenwick, 1.2.9 Nick In our society we tend to expect not to have to face the likelihood of death until our 70s at least, but one group of people who are having to face the prospect of death at a relatively young age are those diagnosed as HIV-positive. Controversy surrounds the issue of whether those at risk of contracting the virus should have the blood test which might give them that death sentence. At the time of writing there is no clear evidence that any treatment can improve the prognosis, even if taken at 1.2.5 Together Forever At the opposite end of the spectrum stand Paul and Gemma Massey, the British co-ordinators of Together Forever, an affiliation of the Flame Foundation, a group of self-proclaimed physically immortal people in Arizona. The Foundation began some 30 years ago after an Evangelical minister, Charles Paul Brown, claimed to have had a ‘cellular awakening’ in which Christ told him that physical immortality was the true Christian message. The group claims to have about 2,000 members world-wi 1.1 Living with death and dying Knowledge and beliefs about death can have a profound effect both on the way people live and the way they approach their own death. In this Unit we look in depth at these issues. There are three sections. The first section addresses the effects that the knowledge that we die has on our lives. Here we explore how the beliefs people hold about death affect the meaning they attach to life. We try to imagine what life would be like if it did not end in death. Given that we do die, we examin 1.2 Where can you find life stories? Life stories are everywhere. In adverts, magazines, music, sport, politics, chat shows, the messages we get are personalised through interviews and stories which tell us about quite intimate details of people's lives, feelings, emotions and even what feel like secrets. Autobiography and personal accounts have also become increasingly common means of revealing different versions of the past, with television and radio programmes focusing on ‘ordinary’ life events or the stories of ‘ordina 2 A day in the life of a hospital ward In 1996, we visited Ward 29, one of two gastroenterology wards in the medical unit, and recorded the views of patients and staff. The ward has 24 beds. Its patients were women and men, across a wide age range, suffering from digestive disorders – for example, stomach ulcers, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, cancers of the digestive system or problems with liver function brought on by alcohol abuse. Because it was winter the ward had more elderly people than it would have at other times 1.5.1 Agreeing who to be So far I have focused on one-to-one interactions. Yet ‘defining a scene’ is often a group effort. Goffman says this involves teamwork, with all participants, in effect, agreeing to act and speak within an overall frame of reference. He suggests that it works like a theatrical play in which everyone has taken on a part within the scene. To play your part means setting aside all those aspects of yourself which are not relevant to your role. The scene works only because everyone plays their 6.3 The role of oxygen in sports performance The body uses oxygen in a chemical process that produces fuel for the muscles. You might think that the transfer of oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body is vitally important for all athletes. However, you might be surprised to hear that although this process is important in many sports, it doesn't matter very much at all in quite a few. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: the transfer of oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body takes time. In events that don't 6.2 The body, the lungs and oxygen The figure shows a simple image of how the lungs absorb oxygen from the air. Air contains several differ 6.1 Introduction We have learnt that part of the reason the heart pumps blood around is to make sure that the body gets a fresh supply of oxygen. So in the same way that our hearts need to keep beating, we need to keep breathing oxygen into our lungs to survive. But what is the function of oxygen? Why does our body need oxygen, and what does it do with it once we have breathed it in? These are some of the questions that we will examine in first part of this section. In the second part of this section, w 4.1 Introduction The heart is the engine of the human body – but what about it's specific function in athletes participating in sport? We have seen that athletes need to get oxygen and nutrients to different parts of their body quickly – this means they need an efficient cardiovascular system, this means having an efficient heart. What do we mean by an efficient heart? We mean one that pumps a lot of blood with every beat and that can beat quickly for a long period of time. An athlete's heart differ 3 Problems with quantification One of the main problems with the medicalisation of death and dying is the idea that science has all the answers. Illness and dying carry the same degree of unpredictability and uncertainty as all everyday life events. So when service providers draw on medical knowledge and experience to offer some certainty and in one way to quantify the dying experience, it can be difficult to challenge. Indeed, there is a tension between wanting certainty and hoping for things to be different. Campaigner a
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