Category / Sociology & Social Policy

Risk of kidney problems in migrant workers

Congratulations to Dr. Pramod Regmi, Lecturer in International Health & Global Engagement Lead, Department of Nursing Sciences, and Dr. Nirmal Aryal, formerly of the Centre of Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH), whose editorial “Kidney health risk of migrant workers: An issue we can no longer overlook” has been published today in Health Prospect [1].  Further co-authors (Arun Sedhain, Radheshyam Krishna KC, Erwin Martinez Faller, Aney Rijal, and Edwin van Teijlingen) work in India, Nepal, the Philippines and at BU.  The study was funded by GCRF.

This editorial highlights that low-skilled migrant workers in the countries of the Gulf and Malaysia are at a disproportionately higher risk of kidney health problems. The working conditions are often Dirty, Dangerous and Difficult (referred at as the 3Ds) include physically demanding work, exposure to a hot environment, dehydration, chemical exposures, excessive use of pain killers, and lifestyle factors (such as restricted water intake and a high intake of alcohol/sugary drinks) which may precipitate them to acute kidney injuries and subsequent chronic kidney disease.  

References

  1. Aryal, N., Regmi, P.R., Sedhain, A., KC, R.K., Martinez Faller, E., Rijal, A., van Teijlingen, E., (2021) Kidney health risk of migrant workers: An issue we can no longer overlook. Health Prospect 21(1): 15-17.

New paper on student recycling behaviour with former BU Sociology student!

I am really pleased to announce the publication of our paper ‘Don’t be a waster! Student perceptions of recycling strategies at an English University’s halls of residence’ in the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education. Joseph Dixon, a former sociology student at Bournemouth University, worked alongside myself to publish research that he undertook concerning recycling behaviours among students. The paper can be accessed at Emerald EarlyCite https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJSHE-10-2020-0383/full/html.

Prof Jonathan Parker

BU conference presentation on migration and COVID-19 in Nepal

Yesterday Dr. Pramod Regmi, Dr. Shovita Dhakal Adhikari, Dr. Nirmal Aryal and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, all based in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, presented at the tenth Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal & the Himalaya.  Their paper ‘Moral panic and othering practices during Nepal’s COVID-19 Pandemic (A study with returnee migrants and Muslims in Nepal)’ was co-authored by Dr. Sharada Prasad Wasti from the University of Huddersfield and Shreeman Sharma (Department of  Conflict, Peace & Development
Studies, Tribhuvan University, Nepal).  The presentation was partly based on research funded by the British Academy.

 

Care at home in the time of covid.

Covid-19 lockdowns and social distancing have socially and spatially reorganised the reproductive labour entailed in supporting, maintaining and sustaining people in everyday life. The closure of schools, day centres, shops and non-essential services, alongside prohibitions on household mixing, have meant that caring work has been much more spatially concentrated and contained within households than in normal times. For reasons of health, age or physical frailty, a large number of adults have come to depend more than usual on others to support and care for them at home.

Over the past year, I’ve been carrying out a British Academy-funded study exploring the experiences of people who provide home-based care and support. I’ve examined three areas, or what I call infrastructures of provision; family carers, home (domiciliary) care services and voluntary and community sector initiatives which support people at home. Focusing on Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole (BCP) and Dorset local authority areas, I’ve been examining the challenges these infrastructures faced during the pandemic. I’ve carried out semi-structured interviews with carers, volunteers and volunteer coordinators, as well as home (domiciliary) care workers and their managers, to learn about their experiences.

Social care, the voluntary and community sector and the family are usually studied separately. Why does this study bring them together?

Firstly, despite differences between them, there are some basic similarities between what volunteers, care workers and carers do in looking after people in their own homes during the pandemic. All have been directly engaged in the vitally important work of sustaining people through the crisis, keeping them safe at home by ensuring some of their essential needs (for food, medicines) were met. Many were also providing company and comfort for people isolated at home. They did this in different ways depending on their role – in person, with PPE, over the phone, or at a safe two meters distance from the front door.

Another feature shared across the three infrastructures is the low levels of public investment each receives. The social care system has always been highly residual in the UK (Lewis 2001), but is becoming even more so. In recent years, the numbers of people entitled to public support with social care costs has been in overall decline, particularly amongst adults of retirement age (Bottery 2020). Home care workers in social care are also amongst the lowest paid workers in the UK, at a median hourly rate of £8.50 (Skills for care 2021).
Similarly, state financial support for carers is one of the lowest paid amongst all state benefits, at £67.25 per week, and many carers are in financial hardship (Carers UK 2021). The voluntary and community sector has been significantly impacted by government austerity measures over the last decade, albeit unevenly (Kay 2020). Many voluntary organisations rely on support from local authorities, which have absorbed massive cuts to public finances.

Thus, despite its high social value and the fact that it has been indispensible to the welfare and wellbeing of large numbers of people during the pandemic, the work carried out by carers, care workers and volunteers receives shockingly meagre levels of public funding. That this contradiction is both unsustainable and deeply unjust has long been recognised by policy makers, campaigning groups, academics, trade unions and some politicians (see further Bear et al 2020, Dowling 2021, Wood and Skeggs 2020).

Taking a broader historical perspective, some feminist scholars argue that this contradiction is a systemic feature of capitalism. Capitalist accumulation depends on activities that recreate and sustain people, thereby enabling workers, consumers, markets, production and productivity to exist at all. But it also relies on offloading the costs of these activities (eg., onto families) such that they do not overly impede the creation and expansion of wealth, but instead appear to be separate and external to it (Ferguson 2020). Nonetheless, political demands that a greater share of this wealth be redistributed to enable people to better sustain themselves and each other can be and have been made, in different historical contexts, and with mixed successes. The outcomes of this core tension are not given, but are constantly being worked out in social and political life.

In the present moment in the UK, the pandemic has made starker than ever the contradiction between the vital importance of home care on the one hand, and its underinvestment and public neglect on the other. As large parts of the productive economy were shut down, a new appreciation of essential workers crystallized, and our collective dependence on their contribution was publicly ritualised in the weekly ‘clap for our carers’ event. Public support for greater care justice appears to be growing (Wood and Skeggs, 2020). This makes now a key moment to capture and compare the experiences of people who sustained others during the pandemic, and consider how these could inform the creation of a new, fairer care settlement in the UK.

References

Bear, L., James, D., Simpson, N., Alexander, E., Bhogal, J., Bowers, R., Cannell, F., Lohiya, A., Koch, I., Laws, M., Lenhard, J., Long, N., Pearson, A., Samanani, F., Vicol, D., Vieira, J., Watt, C., Wuerth, M., Whittle, C., Bărbulescu, T., 2020. The right to care. The social foundations of recovery from Covid-19 [online]. Covid and care research group: London school of economics. Available from: https://www.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/assets/documents/research/Covid-and-Care/ARighttoCare-CovidandCare-Final-2310.pdf (Accessed 13.7.2021)

Bottery, S., 2020. Social care services. Funding cuts are biting hard. The Kings Fund [online]. 9th January. Available from: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2020/01/social-care-funding-cuts-are-biting-hard (Accessed 13.7.2021).

Carers UK, 2021. Fairer for carers – background information [online]. Carers UK. Available from: https://www.carersuk.org/news-and-campaigns/campaigns/fairer-for-carers-background (Accessed 13.7.2021).

Dowling, E., 2021. The care crisis. What caused it and how do we end it? London: Verso.

Ferguson, S., 2020. Women and work. Feminism, labour and social reproduction. London: Pluto Press

Kay, L., 2020. Ten years of cuts have ‘damaged health and widened regional inequality’ [online]. Third sector, 20th February 2020. Available from: https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/ten-years-cuts-have-damaged-health-widened-regional-inequality/policy-and-politics/article/1674970 (Accessed 13.7.2021).

Lewis, J., 2001. Older people and the health-social care boundary in the UK: Half a century of hidden policy conflict. Social policy & administration. 35 (4), 343-359.

Skills for Care, 2021. Pay in the adult social care sector [online]. Available from: https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/adult-social-care-workforce-data/Workforce-intelligence/documents/Pay-in-ASC-sector-2020.pdf (Accessed 13.7.2021)

Wood, H and Skeggs, B., 2021. Clap for carers? From care gratitude to care justice. European journal of cultural studies, 23 (4), 641-647.

International Confederation of Midwives online conference started today

The ICM (International Confederation of Midwives) planned its tri-annual conference for 2020.  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic this conference was postponed and this year summer it is being held online.  BU’s Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) has a number of great contributions, starting with today’s Symposium ‘Birth by Design 20 years on- a sociological lens on midwifery in the year of the midwife’.

The following sessions, to which CMMPH academic have contributed, are ones to look forward to over the next month:

  • Uniting the voice of midwifery education in the United Kingdom: the evolution and impact of the role of the Lead Midwife for Education (S. Way & N. Clark)
  • Students’ experience of “hands off/hands on” support for breastfeeding in clinical practice (A. Taylor, G. Bennetts & C. Angell)
  • Changing the narrative around childbirth: whose responsibility is it? (V. Hundley, A. Luce, E. van Teijlingen & S. Edlund)
  • The social/medical of maternity care AND you (E. van Teijlingen)
  • Developing an evidence-based toolkit to support practice assessment in midwifery (M. Fisher, H. Bower, S. Chenery Morris, F. Galloway, J. Jackson & S. Way)
  • Are student midwives equipped to support normal birth? (J. Wood & J. Fry)

 

New international midwifery paper

Today the editor of the European Journal of Midwifery emailed to announce the acceptance of the paper ‘Slovenian midwifery professionalisation: Perception of midwives and related health professions’ [1].   The first author from Slovenia, Dr. Polona Mivšek, has a long working relationship with BU’s Prof. Vanora Hundley (Professor of Midwifery) in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH).  The paper is the result of an international collaboration between the University of Ljubljana and Bournemouth University as well as an interdisciplinary collaboration between midwifery and sociology.

 

 

Reference:

  1. Mivšek, A.P., Hundley, V., van Teijlingen, E., Pahor, M., Hlebec, V. (2021) Slovenian midwifery professionalisation: Perception of midwives and related health professions, European Journal of Midwifery (forthcoming)

NIHR Supporting Social Care Research in South Central Workshop 26th May 2021

Developing a Strategy for Addressing NIHR Priorities

Our RDS colleagues at South Central are hosting a one-day workshop for those interested in social care research. If you are a social care researcher or practitioner, a user, commissioner or provider of social care services and have ideas about how to develop and support social care research in South Central, please join them for the day.

Find out more

Your local branch of the NIHR RDS (Research Design Service) is based within the BU Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU)

We can help with your application. We advise on all aspects of developing an application and can review application drafts as well as put them to a mock funding panel (run by RDS South West) known as Project Review Committee, which is a fantastic opportunity for researchers to obtain a critical review of a proposed grant application before this is sent to a funding body.

Contact us as early as possible to benefit fully from the advice

Feel free to call us on 01202 961939 or send us an email.

 

Congratulations to PhD student Raksha Thapa

This week BU PhD student Raksha Thapa  heard from the editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health that her  manuscript “Caste Exclusion and Health Discrimination in South Asia: A Systematic Review” has been accepted for publication [1].  Raksha is supervised in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences by Dr. Pramod Regmi, Dr. Vanessa Heaslip and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.  The paper is a systematic review and the protocol for it was published in PROSPERO early on at the start of her PhD studies [2].

Well done!

 

References

  1. Thapa, R., van Teijlingen, E., Regmi, P., Heaslip, V. (2021) Caste Exclusion and Health Discrimination in South Asia: A Systematic Review, Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health (accepted).
  2. Thapa, R., van Teijlingen, E., Regmi, P., Heaslip, V. (2018) Caste exclusion and health discrimination. Prospero CRD42018110431crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/display_record.php?ID=CRD42018110431

Happy New Year 2078 (in Nepal)

Bournemouth University wishes all its Nepali students, staff and collaborators in both the UK and in Nepal a Healthy and Happy New Year 2078 today.