The Politics of Palliative Care in Resource Limited Settings

Autores

  • Kalei Richard James Hosaka Wheaton College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15273/jue.v7i1.8408

Resumo

Whose lives are valuable? Whose lives are worth living? This essay examines these questions by investigating the ways in which global health development programs deal with palliative care, specifically care for people living with HIV, in resource-limited settings. Through interviews and participant observation, I explore the concept of worth as expressed by a particular funding agency and the Central Hospital Network‘s (CHN) palliative care staff in an Asian country (not specified due to ethical considerations). Based on six months of ethnographic investigation conducted during an internship from February through August 2015 in a palliative care hospital and organization associated with CHN focused on caring for the poor living with HIV/AIDS, I argue that decisions regarding funding for people with incurable diseases are inseparably tied to understandings of whose lives are more valuable than others. I argue that palliative care that seeks to improve the quality of life for persons with life-threatening illness—especially in resource-limited settings—will continue to face barriers to its development as long as it is judged by utilitarian, neoliberal development standards.

Downloads

Edição

Vol. 7 N.º 1 (2017)

Secção

Articles

Licença

By sending potential submissions to the editors, you grant The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography a royalty-free, perpetual, license to: use, reproduce, store, adapt, translate, and publicly display such submissions for any purpose.  In addition to the grant of the above license, you hereby consent to your name appearing as the contributor of any submission where applicable, and to the disclosure and/or display of such information and any other information which appears in or is associated with a submission. Further, you acknowledge and agree that The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography is not responsible for any loss, damage, or corruption that may occur to your submissions, and acknowledge and agree that any submissions you provide for display on the website will be considered non-confidential. If your manuscript is rejected, the above license is revoked, and your submission (manuscript, name, and associated documentation) will be stored only in the correspondence records of The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. You may submit your manuscript to other publications, but must withdraw if selected for publication in The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Your paper itself is published using a strict Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License that allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can‘t change them in any way or use them commercially. You retain the right to grant other permissions.