ISOBEL THORLEY Dear Elizabeth Truss, Nadine Dorris and Priti Patel, As the Minister for Women and Equalities, Minister of State Mental Health, and Home Secretary, I am writing to you because you have the responsibility to tackle an issue that your government has failed to acknowledge, namely the lack of gender-based-approaches to policy implementation during…
Tag: medical anthropology
A Letter to Matt Hancock
URSULA WHITE February 2021 Dear Secretary of State, I am writing to express my concern on discovering that, as of February 2021, Operose Health has acquired AT Medics, a company that currently has contracts to operate 49 GP London surgeries (Lacobucci 2021). Operose Health was created in January 2020 as a subsidiary of Centene, a…
Letter to Jens Spahn
JASMIN SIMAO AJAYI Dear Mr. Spahn, I am a German citizen from Munich, currently in my final year of studying Anthropology at the University College London (UCL). I am writing to you today to address an issue that has come to my attention recently: the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on economically disadvantaged and minority ethnic people in…
It’s Not A Sin: improving HIV/AIDS education in the UK
PIA KEELEY-JOHNSON Dear Gavin Williamson, I am a queer woman living in London who, like more than 18.9 million people1 who sat down to watch Russell Davies’ hit show It’s A Sin over the last two months, just received the best HIV/AIDS education of my 23 years of life from a TV drama. I was not totally ignorant to…
Eating Disorders, Education, and TikTok
EMILIE THOMPSON 28th February 2021 Dear Mrs Murdoch, Please let me express my enormous gratitude for the work you and your team continue to conduct in the face of the current pandemic. The NHS are demonstrating unwavering resilience and dedication that is nothing short of inspiring. As a postgraduate student from UCL, I write in response…
An Epidemic of Loneliness
PEPE WEISCHER Dear Mr Spahn, The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has strained the capacity of the German health system in unprecedented ways, but it seems to me that one crucial aspect of lockdown measures has been profoundly undermined: the loss of social cohesion and mental health support for children and adolescents. By no means do I…
A Letter for Malcolm Reed
TANYA SHARMA Dear Professor Malcolm Reed, (Lead Co-Chair of the Medical Schools Council), I am a medical student in the UK writing to you to discuss the teaching we have had on Social Determinants of Health as part of our medical education and how it may be beneficial for this to be further developed and…
A Letter to Tedros A. Ghebreyesus
AY NASSIMOLDINA Dear Dr Tedros A. Ghebreyesus, The world is in a vulnerable state right now, and we have trusted you with the World Health Organization to lead us through a global health crisis. However, it is so vital not to relax or neglect health issues that might be veiled with seemingly optimal solutions. I appreciate and…
A Letter to Andrew Selous
SHOLA AJAO Dear Mr Andrew Selous, It is unfortunate that I find myself writing to you again during these unprecedented times. As you may recall, I wrote July of last year concerning the case of Belly Mujinga, a black woman, a victim of a racially motivated attack, who later died after being spat on whilst working…
Fighting Inequality by Improving NHS Dental and Oral Care
MAXINE PEPPER 22nd March 2021 Dear Sir Stevens, RE: Fighting inequality by improving NHS dental and oral care The COVID-19 pandemic brought the discourse on health back to the heart of society. I personally cannot remember ever talking about health and illness prevention more than during the previous 12 months. Given your long list of recent media appearances, I believe you must feel the same. However, my anthropology…
Advocacy Letters: Anthropological Calls for Public and Global Health Change
Series Introduction CARRIE RYAN For the next few weeks, the UCL Medical Anthropology blog will run a special series called ‘Advocacy Letters: Anthropological Calls for Public and Global Health Change.’ This series will showcase nine Advocacy Letters written by UCL anthropology undergraduates and postgraduates. In these letters, students use anthropological insights to advocate for change on a variety of health-related topics, including, for example, dental care, loneliness, and vaccine hesitancy. These Advocacy Letters…
Troubled Togetherness: Visually Impaired People’s Unsettling and Tiresome Journey towards Community Belonging
ANNAMARIA DALL’ANESE The word ‘community’ has heart-warming connotations of mutual support and reciprocal understanding. The sense of belonging that stems from being integrated into a social world perfused with care and empathy is seen as so universally desirable that nothing hints at the difficulties that becoming part of a specific community may entail. The focus…
Changing perspectives, Infrastructuring care
MICHELA COZZA On 21 March 2020, during the first COVID-19 pandemic peak in Italy, a group of doctors working at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, published an article titled “At the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic and humanitarian crises in Italy: Changing perspectives on preparation and mitigation” (Nacoti et al., 2020). This title…
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Consciously (Re)Quarantined
As nations across Europe find the inevitable domino of new national lockdowns knocking into them, we may all approach ‘this time’ differently from the last. During the interim a lot has happened to reconfigure our realities, both politically and pandemically: Black Lives Matter, the US elections, the French terrorist attacks…sparks are flying, and we all…
Mental Health Avenues Amidst A Global Pandemic: Conceptualising The Biosocial Medical Framework Within Urban ‘Green Spaces’
TIFFANY LOERA Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. This is my morning mantra. As I lay in my bed in the early hours of the morning, I am aware of the limited capacity I have to walk the short distance to my workspace. Like clockwork, the strict schedule I have carefully designed for maximum productivity, relentlessly and…
Biosocial Medical Anthropology in the Time of Covid-19. New Challenges and Opportunities.
SAHRA GIBBON, LEWIS DALY, AARON PARKHURST, CARRIE RYAN, GUL DENIZ SALALI AND ALEX TASKER As the events of the past few months concerning the coronavirus have unfolded across the globe, those of us who teach on a newly established MSc in Biosocial Medical Anthropology have become acutely aware of the immediate relevance of this unique…
“Stay Safe, Shirley. I’ll See You Shortly!”
Conducting Fieldwork with People with Dementia Before, and (Hopefully) After the Pandemic. CRISTINA DOUGLAS 12th March 2020 I look forward to Thursdays. It’s the day when Sarah and Bonnie, her Labradoodle therapet, visit the care home where I conduct my fieldwork. For the last two months, I’ve been regularly visiting Golden Age Care Home for…
Care Labour and Isolation in Italy: New Ethical Challenges Part Two
FRANCESCO DIODATI In the last post, I wrote about the effects of the COVID-19 emergency on elderly care in Italy and the new ethical challenges that emerged in one of the most aged countries in the world under the current crisis. I discussed how the main issue has become how to balance the risk of…
Care Labour and Isolation in Italy: New Ethical Challenges Part One
FRANCESCO DIODATI Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, I’ve decided to make a report on the effects of isolation politics on care labour in Italy, starting from the way the new scenario was reshaping my ethnographic research on elder care in Emilia-Romagna. Emilia-Romagna is one of the northern regions most affected by contagion and…
Stuck Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Risk Assessment and Ethical Dilemmas in the Time of Covid-19
The View From The Front Line As Osteopath/Medical Anthropologist MARIA LARRAIN A week ago, the diary started to look unusually quiet but not surprising giving how the news about coronavirus was unfolding. I had expected that we may have to close if a full lockdown was enforced and started to look into taking video consultations…