The politics of staying behind the frontline of coronavirus

Abstract

Intended as a contribution to the Waiting in Pandemic Times project Collection in response to COVID-19, this short theoretical paper views the coronavirus crisis in terms of its unpredictable effects on the interior life of the National Health Service (NHS) workforce. Written immediately following the suspension (due to the pandemic) of an ethnographic investigation of waiting in a general practice in London, it tracks the first signs that working definitions of time would struggle to survive the onset of a temporality of acute crisis in the NHS. The paper considers what it might mean for healthcare practitioners at this particular moment in the NHS’s history to be living through an experience of ‘the ordinary’ breaking down. It also follows hints of new temporal modes of care appearing during this same period when one kind of crisis in the NHS has been put on hold, and another (the crisis of coronavirus) is just getting underway.