Bodies in peril: Healthcare workers on the frontlines of global maternal health interventions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in maternity settings in Tanzania and Pakistan, we argue that ‘bodywork’ condenses all politically and practically at stake for maternal healthcare providers. Our research confronts how global health programmes expect paramedical providers working on the frontlines of obstetrics to implement interventions without also attending to violent everyday realities of providing care amidst structural constraint and precarity. We demonstrate this approach's dire aftermaths. Healthcare workers’ bodies evidence risks and injuries not only attendant on care in lower-resource settings, but which unfold specifically from their efforts to meet the onerous demands of global health systems. Toxic hospital environments represent a paradox of care – medicine exposes patients and providers to greater risks than if medicine were not involved – but this inherent riskiness barely registers. Elisions of healthcare providers’ experiences of harm are telling; they reveal global health’s neglect of occupational risk and a racialised under-attention and under-valuing of the risks carried by bodies of colour, and women especially. We trace and corroborate providers’ experiences of threats to their wellbeing while enacting global health agendas. We conclude with a provocation that social scientists’ bedside witnessing must result in actionable evidence if a more sustainable global health is to prevail.