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“Unworthy of Care and Treatment”: Cultural Devaluation and Structural Constraints to Healthcare-Seeking for Older People in Rural China
This paper examines the experiences of seeking healthcare for rural Chinese older people, a population who experiences the multiple threats of socio-economic deprivation, marginalization, and lack of access to medical care, yet have been relatively overlooked within the existing scholarly literature...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7143512/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32210084 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17062132 |
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author | Zou, Xiang Fitzgerald, Ruth Nie, Jing-Bao |
author_facet | Zou, Xiang Fitzgerald, Ruth Nie, Jing-Bao |
author_sort | Zou, Xiang |
collection | PubMed |
description | This paper examines the experiences of seeking healthcare for rural Chinese older people, a population who experiences the multiple threats of socio-economic deprivation, marginalization, and lack of access to medical care, yet have been relatively overlooked within the existing scholarly literature. Based on ethnographical data collected from six-month fieldwork conducted in a rural primary hospital in Southern China, this paper identifies a widespread discouraging, dispiriting attitude regarding healthcare-seeking for rural older members despite the ongoing efforts of institutional reforms with a particular focus on addressing access to health services amongst rural populations. Such an attitude was expressed by older people’s families as well as the public in their narratives by devaluing older members’ health care demands as “unworthy of care and treatment” (“buzhide zhi” in Chinese). It was also internalized by older people, based on which they deployed a family-oriented health-seeking model and strategically downgraded their expectation on receiving medical care. Moreover, underpinning this discouragement and devaluation, as well as making them culturally legitimate, is the social expectation of rural older people to be enduring and restrained with health-seeking. Simultaneously, this paper highlights the sourc2e of institutional and structural impediments, as they intersect with unfavorable socio-cultural values that normalize discouragement and devaluation. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7143512 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-71435122020-04-14 “Unworthy of Care and Treatment”: Cultural Devaluation and Structural Constraints to Healthcare-Seeking for Older People in Rural China Zou, Xiang Fitzgerald, Ruth Nie, Jing-Bao Int J Environ Res Public Health Article This paper examines the experiences of seeking healthcare for rural Chinese older people, a population who experiences the multiple threats of socio-economic deprivation, marginalization, and lack of access to medical care, yet have been relatively overlooked within the existing scholarly literature. Based on ethnographical data collected from six-month fieldwork conducted in a rural primary hospital in Southern China, this paper identifies a widespread discouraging, dispiriting attitude regarding healthcare-seeking for rural older members despite the ongoing efforts of institutional reforms with a particular focus on addressing access to health services amongst rural populations. Such an attitude was expressed by older people’s families as well as the public in their narratives by devaluing older members’ health care demands as “unworthy of care and treatment” (“buzhide zhi” in Chinese). It was also internalized by older people, based on which they deployed a family-oriented health-seeking model and strategically downgraded their expectation on receiving medical care. Moreover, underpinning this discouragement and devaluation, as well as making them culturally legitimate, is the social expectation of rural older people to be enduring and restrained with health-seeking. Simultaneously, this paper highlights the sourc2e of institutional and structural impediments, as they intersect with unfavorable socio-cultural values that normalize discouragement and devaluation. MDPI 2020-03-23 2020-03 /pmc/articles/PMC7143512/ /pubmed/32210084 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17062132 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Zou, Xiang Fitzgerald, Ruth Nie, Jing-Bao “Unworthy of Care and Treatment”: Cultural Devaluation and Structural Constraints to Healthcare-Seeking for Older People in Rural China |
title | “Unworthy of Care and Treatment”: Cultural Devaluation and Structural Constraints to Healthcare-Seeking for Older People in Rural China |
title_full | “Unworthy of Care and Treatment”: Cultural Devaluation and Structural Constraints to Healthcare-Seeking for Older People in Rural China |
title_fullStr | “Unworthy of Care and Treatment”: Cultural Devaluation and Structural Constraints to Healthcare-Seeking for Older People in Rural China |
title_full_unstemmed | “Unworthy of Care and Treatment”: Cultural Devaluation and Structural Constraints to Healthcare-Seeking for Older People in Rural China |
title_short | “Unworthy of Care and Treatment”: Cultural Devaluation and Structural Constraints to Healthcare-Seeking for Older People in Rural China |
title_sort | “unworthy of care and treatment”: cultural devaluation and structural constraints to healthcare-seeking for older people in rural china |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7143512/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32210084 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17062132 |
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