Oral Presentations Abstracts: LIVED SOLIDARITY IN THE AUSTRIAN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM. HEALTHCARE WORKERS’ SOLIDARISTIC PRACTICES WITH REFUGEES

Abstract

View of Volume 66, Special Issue, September 2021

Disadvantaged groups, such as migrant patients facing language and cultural barriers, often have a harder time getting medically necessary services. Drawing upon data from interviews with, and observations of, healthcare workers in Vienna, Austria, we suggest that they play an important role closing structural gaps within a solidarity-based healthcare system. In our analysis of the lived solidarity of healthcare workers we found three different types of practices:

First, by practices that we call concretising solidarity, healthcare workers act as the mouth, ear, and arm of a solidarity-based healthcare system. They shape solidaristic institutions through their everyday practice. Second, they fill gaps left open by institutionalised solidarity in the healthcare system. Such practices of compensating solidarity become an inherent corrective to the system. A third form of lived solidarity, creating solidarity, goes one step further by trying to create new rules that change the existing norms and instruments (new laws, but also new criteria for the allocation of resources, etc.).

We argue that paying systematic attention to these practices of lived solidarity can help us to improve healthcare services and to ensure that they do not leave disadvantaged and marginalised people behind.