Economic Care Research Articles

Gender and mobility: enhancing the Egyptian working women’s travel pattern

PurposeWomen's travel pattern is different from those of men. Women who have both paid employment and unpaid care work have more complex travel patterns. However, land-use policies and urban mobility strategies in the Egyptian context do not consider these differences. This paper analyzes and discusses the travel patterns of the Egyptian working women with children. It examines the difference between men's and women's travel behavior in different income levels. The paper aims at determining the main factors that affect working women's travel patterns within the care economy framework and suggesting recommendations for enhancing women's travel patterns in Greater Cairo Region (GCR).Design/methodology/approachThe methodology relies on conducting a quantitative and qualitative analysis using questionnaires and interviews with working women and men from different social/economic levels in two different workplaces in GCR.FindingsThe results demonstrate that income level, workplace locations, schools locations, and schools typologies greatly affect working women's travel patterns in GCR.Originality/valueThe study findings will help urban planners and decision-makers to improve working women's mobility to make their daily trips shorter and more accessible to achieve equitable cities through understanding the conducted affecting factors and considering the suggested recommendations.

Long‐term care in the context of population ageing: What role for social protection policies?

AbstractWith the acceleration of population ageing, healthy ageing is becoming an imperative for all. Social protection systems have an important role to play in this endeavour. Through a life cycle approach, social protection systems can support i) the prevention of disability in old age (i.e. by addressing the social determinants of health and rehabilitation), ii) effective access to long‐term care without hardship for those who need it, and iii) decent work in the care economy. To do so will require adopting a gender‐transformative approach. Indeed, women are disproportionately represented among both older persons and long‐term care providers in their diversity. Further, to adequately contribute to healthy ageing and effective access to long‐term care without hardship as a rights‐based entitlement, social protection systems will need to build strong coordination between health care, social care and other social policies. This article highlights the key entry points for social protection systems to contribute to the United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing, building on the rights‐based approach of human rights and international social security standards.

Конкурентоспособность новых поколений на современном рынке труда: экономический аспект

The questions of the competitive ability of new generations at modern labour market become particularly relevant in conditions of high uncertainty and rapid transformation of the global labour market due to the covid19 pandemic and the geopolitical crisis 2022. Experts of the World Economic Forum believe that in the conditions of accelerating automation and robotization, a significant number of workers will not be able to keep their jobs to 2025. The process of creating new jobs in the care economy, green technologies, databases and cloud computing, artificial intelligence has a slower speed. The real prospect in the next two to three years will be a significant increase in unemployment. There is a problem of creating the necessary conditions for ensuring employment of the population. This article analyzes the situation on the Russian labor market from the point of view of the generations that make up the majority of the labor force, and the prospects of employment prospects of youth and women, as the two most vulnerable groups.

Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economy

ABSTRACT This article examines the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine both in Palestine and globally through a decolonial lens. In dominant Euro-American discourse, the invention, production, and distribution of the vaccine is largely judged as an indicator of sophisticated and advanced health care systems and economies. The underlying premise being that the advanced, wealthy, and capable nation-states have endogenously earned the position of power and prosperity. The world’s poor nation-states are posited as the recipients of charity from these rich states only after the latter have sufficiently inoculated themselves. The entire discourse turns the question of vaccines into a series of technical questions about capabilities, facilities, infrastructure, economic purchasing power, and so on. Concealed in this discourse is a settler colonial foundation – an aspiration towards omnipresent and absolute power – which not only creates the contrast between Palestinians and Israelis, rich and poor, colonizer and colonized, but also seals a forcefully imposed settler colonial contract in which colonizing populations ensure their ability to inoculate themselves by debilitating the colonized.

Vitamin D: A Potential Mitigation Tool for the Endemic Stage of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The impact of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic and associated development of clinical symptoms of COVID-19 have presented an enormous global impact on our health care systems, public health and economy. To date several observational epidemiological studies consistently found that vitamin D deficiency, measured as low levels of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D, is associated with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, certain cancers, autoimmune diseases and many infectious diseases, including acute respiratory infections. Since vitamin D is not merely immunosuppressive but also acts as an immunomodulator in tolerance and homeostasis, many experts have considered a role of vitamin D in the prevalence and severity of immune mediated inflammatory diseases, such as SARS-CoV-2, adding to the evidence of the importance of vitamin D in the immune response against viral respiratory infections and reinforcing the need for targeted vitamin D supplementation, with a focus on high-risk populations and a high-dose supplementation treatment for COVID-19 hospitalized patients. The expected transition to endemicity of SARS-CoV-2 even further corroborates as a potential of vitamin D as an potential mitigation tool for the prevention of COVID-19. The aim of this paper is to analyse the current evidence regarding vitamin D and present a hypothesis of its potential role in the current COVID-19 pandemic and in the future as a potential preventive measurement in public health.

Azamba publics: containment, care and curating in the “expanded private sphere”

ABSTRACT The lack of space, movement and even breath afforded to many communities cuts across seemingly mobile life trajectories, constraining and constricting even (and often especially) the movement of people across and within transnational borders. How do arts organisations and projects explicitly work against the violence of these forms of constraint? Where liberal models of the public sphere have underpinned many ideas of art in public space—particularly those based in the notions of appearance and the “general” public—it is from situated praxes originating from what Stahl and Stoecker have described as the “expanded private sphere” that poignant lessons can be learned of a community and curatorial practice dedicated to solidarity and support. In this paper, we elaborate a notion of art in public that refuses a division from the “private”, without straying unproblematically into the terrain of the personal or exploitative economies of care. We draw from our collaborative experiences in using creative strategies for countering the narrative containment of refugee groups in the face of UK media racism through the project Conflict, Memory, Displacement as well as the limitations we encountered. Using the concept of Azamba—a Malawan practice of community care and midwifery recently adopted by the women’s group Global Sistaz United in Nottingham, UK—we further elaborate how practices and narrations of care and community support might reconfigure our relation to ideas of art, curating and publics.

Ageing, embodiment and datafication: Dynamics of power in digital health and care technologies

As a growing body of work has documented, digital technologies are central to the imagining of aging futures. In this study, we offer a critical, theoretical framework for exploring the dynamics of power related to the technological tracking, measuring, and managing of aging bodies at the heart of these imaginaries. Drawing on critical gerontology, feminist technoscience, sociology of the body, and socio-gerontechnology, we identify three dimensions of power relations where the designs, operations, scripts, and materialities of technological innovation implicate asymmetrical relationships of control and intervention: (1) aging bodies and the power of numbers, (2) aging spaces and the power of surveillance, and (3) age care economies and gendered power relations. While technological care for older individuals has been promoted as a cost-effective way to enhance independence, security, and health, we argue that such optimistic perspectives may obscure the realities of social inequality, agist bias, and exploitative gendered care labour.

Suspected COVID-19 Cases Admitted in a Tertiary Care Hospital. Correlation of Demographic and Clinical Characteristics with Viral Load Results and Hospitalization

Background: The current pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus affected the health care systems, health services and economy globally. It also affected the health of the population worldwide, with high mortality and morbidity rates. The present study aimed to study the patients that were admitted to a tertiary care hospital and to investigate the potential correlation between hospitalization and RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 results with demographic characteristics and clinical characteristics. Moreover, it aimed to examine a mathematical formula that might describe the correlation of the aforementioned parameters.
 Methods: The study population included 1244 patients admitted to the Nikea General Hospital "Agios Panteleimon", Piraeus, Greece. Patient age, gender, underlying diseases, travel history, symptoms, etiology for hospital admission and contact with confirmed cases were recorded. Potential correlation of hospitalization and RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 results with the aforementioned characteristics were identified by chi-square test of independence and logistic regression analysis.
 Results: We observed significant correlation of hospitalization with fever, cough, dyspnea, pneumonia, travel history and etiology for hospital admission. We observed significant correlation of RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 results with rapid antigen test result, hospitalization etiology for hospital admission and contact with confirmed COVI-19 case.
 Conclusions: According to the logistic regression model, RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 result, fever, dyspnea, pneumonia, and underlying disease are the most important predictors for hospitalization in the population under study. Contact with confirmed COVID-19 case is the most important predictor for RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 result.

Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework

This article develops an account of demand-making and provides a novel framework for evaluating the demands and strategies of social movements. It explores three features of demands, arguing that they disclose social conditions, create constituencies, and set the horizons of the world that social movements seek to build. It does so by considering two feminist demands: the demand for wages for housework and for the socialization of housework. By revisiting revolutionary feminism in the 1970s, it contrasts two strategic perspectives articulated in debates about housework: what Selma James called the “perspective of winning” and what I call the “perspective of investment,” a strategy for change that sees short-term reforms as investments in long-term transformations. In light of this, I endorse the demand to socialize housework as apt for the contemporary care economy and show how my account of demand-making contributes to the political theory of social movements by clarifying movement demands for “non-reformist reforms,” such as defund the police.

Disabled Women’s Care Experiences in Turkey: Intimacy, Dependency, Independent Living

The literature on care relationships and independent living is extensive, although geographically limited, and focuses predominantly on the UK, Scandinavia and the US. This paper explores these themes in the context of Turkey. Through a case study approach, it analyses the experiences of three disabled women with distinctive care arrangements (paid professional, familial informal and an eclectic mix). Cases are discussed in relation to the Turkish context and the existing literature. The paper argues that the experiences of disabled Turkish women need to be understood in relation to the Turkish political economy of care (dependent on family support and undocumented migration), cultural aspects of care (shaped by gendered imagery) and the development of disability rights (characterised by limited independent living). Recognising such universal and locally specific aspects of care and independent living across geographies will contribute to a fuller understanding of disabled people’s experiences and enhance theories of care.

Positioning kindness and care at the centre of health services: A case study of an informal health and development programme oriented to surviving well collectively

AbstractThe mainstream development agenda highlights how important access to health care is for poorer regions of the world. In the area of maternal health, this is expressed in a concern to drive down rates of maternal morbidity and improve access to maternal health care services. While important, the focus on metrics misses the way that relations of care are fundamental to good health. This paper takes an example of a project which is offering a different approach to health and development in the resource scarce environment of Luang Prabang Province, in northern Laos. Here, a group of antipodean midwives has partnered with provincial health authorities to offer a midwifery training programme to health workers posted in remote rural health centres. Supported by the analytical tools of diverse economies, this paper explores how this programme centres relationality, collectivity and an ethic of kindness, and discusses the advantages of being relationship based, small and informal. The paper concludes that this training programme can be understood as an example of a community economy of care: based on global networks of care instead of formal development programmes built on global networks of bureaucracy.

Closer. Fatness, desire, and seeing as touching

ABSTRACT Thinking through the concept of “seeing as touching” as articulated in the work of Laura Marks, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer, this article uses a research-creation approach involving somatic and visual prompts to explore questions around intimacy, visuality, touch, and distance. Building on the concepts of desirability hierarchies and economies of care, it investigates connections between fatphobia and feelings of desire and disgust, highlighting the complex role that sensations can play in reproducing and reinforcing normative body standards and white supremacist power structures. The article includes still photographs from a video-based exploration of a fat “haptic visuality” and suggests a connection between the generative ambiguity such an approach to making images can allow for and the inherent transgressive potential of fat embodiment.

Evaluation of Biochemical Test Results in Patients with COVID-19 Infection

Background: The current pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 due to SARS-CoV-2 virus, affected the health care systems, health services and economy globally. Moreover, it significantly affected the health of the population worldwide. Mortality and morbidity rates are still increasing. According to WHO, as of September 2021 there have been 224180869 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 4621173 deaths. USA, India, and Brazil are the three world's worst-hit countries. In Greece the mortality rate is at 3%.
 Methods: Study population included 565 patients, who were admitted at the Emergency Department and the Pathology Department of Naval and Veterans Hospital, Athens, Greece, during a period of 3,5 months. Patients’ demographic characteristics, underlying diseases, travel history, symptoms, aetiology of admission and history of contact with confirmed cases were recorded. All patients included to the study were positive for SARS-CoV-2 and characterized as COVID-19 patients. All statistical analyses were conducted using MINITAB 17.
 Results: Statistically significant differences in the results of albumin (marginal p-value), urea, creatinine, AST, ALT, and LDH between hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients were detected. Also, we observed statistically significant differences in the results of albumin, urea, creatinine, and ALT, between male and female patients. Moreover, patient age was statistically significant between male and female patients. The Logistic regression model of hospitalization show that statistically significant variables are ALT, LDH, age and gender.
 Conclusions: The rapid spreading of the new COVID-19 pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2 increased the need for the measurement of biochemical tests and the evaluation of their correlation with patient hospitalization. Biochemical monitoring of COVID-19 patients is critical for assessing disease severity and progression as well as monitoring therapeutic intervention. Several common biochemical tests have been implicated in COVID-19 infection progression, providing important prognostic information. In the present study we evaluated the test results of albumin, urea, creatinine, AST, ALT, LDH and total bilirubin in patients with COVID-19 infection.

Intertwined like a double helix: A meta-synthesis of the qualitative literature examining the experiences of living with someone with multiple sclerosis.

BackgroundMultiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic serious condition of uncertain course and outcome. There is relatively little literature on the experiences of people who live with a person with MS. They inhabit a locus of care that spans caring for (a relational act) and caring about (a moral stance, addressing fairness, compassion and justice) the person with MS.MethodsUsing the theoretical lens of personhood, we undertook a scoping review and meta‐synthesis of the qualitative literature on the experiences of people who live with a person with MS, focusing on the nature of, and constraints upon, caring.ResultsOf 330 articles, 49 were included in the review. We identified five themes. One of these—seeking information and support—reflects the political economy of care. Two are concerned with the moral domain of care: caring as labour and living with uncertainty. The final two themes—changing identities and adapting to life with a person with MS—point to the negotiation and reconstitution of personhood for both the person with MS and the people they live with.ConclusionPeople with MS are embedded in relational social networks of partners, family and friends, which are fundamental in the support of their personhood; the people who live with them are ‘co‐constituents of the patient's identity’ assisting them to make sense of their world and self in times of disruption due to illness. Support services and health care professionals caring for people with MS are currently very much patient‐centred; young people in particular report that their roles are elided in the health system's interaction with a parent with MS. There is a need to look beyond the person with MS and recognize the relational network of people who surround them and broaden their focus to encompass this network.Patient and Public InvolvementOur research team includes four members with MS and two members with lived experience of living or working with people with MS. A third person (not a team member) who lives with a partner with MS provided feedback on the paper.

Development finance institutions and the care economy: opportunities for building more resilient and gender-equitable economies

ABSTRACT Development finance institutions (DFIs) play a major role in mobilizing private sector investments in developing countries. While there has recently been an increasing interest among DFIs in gender-lens investing, these efforts have been somewhat blind to the question of women’s unpaid work and have not yet led to a stronger investment focus on the care economy. Adopting what has been defined by other feminist scholars as a transformative approach to care, this article analyses the potential transformative effects of private sector investments in the care economy by DFIs to help build more resilient and gender-equitable economies following the global COVID-19 pandemic. The authors find there is significant potential for DFIs to approach investments with a more strategic gender- and care-lens and contribute to the recognition, reduction, redistribution, reward, and representation of care work, in line with their objective to promote sustainable socioeconomic development in developing countries.

STRENGTHENING SOCIAL IMMUNITY THROUGH COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY: INDIA'S EXPERIENCE IN CHALLENGING THE UNCERTAINTY

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the population across the world has been confronted with uncertainty and unpredictability. The world had never been contemplated such a far-reaching, more complex pandemic paradox. As agreed by several experts worldwide, fighting a battle with the COVID-19 pandemic is as complex as any World War. Before understanding its intensity, it created a wider geographical influence and emerged as a global challenge to communities’ health and health care services, economy, politics, and psycho-social environment. It created a vast blockage for humans and society to progress. The pandemic drastically changed the emergency and humanitarian paradigm of disaster management in the nations, which demanded extraordinary actions from the government and communities. It necessitated scientific interventions with a multi-sectoral approach implicit in the social immune system. It was seen that there had been a significant role of collective efforts of the groups and communities that helped to strengthen social immunity. The study is primarily based on secondary sources. The authors’ observations have also been substantiated in analyzing the secondary data. It has tried to analyze the available literature obtained from various journal articles, books, newspapers, e-resources. They have tried to understand how social immune systems played a vital role in challenging the uncertainty borne by COVID- 19. The paper concludes with a reflection on the perspective of the proposed social immunity framework and its possible applications during an emergency, unlike the current pandemic, the significance and dimensions of social immunity, and understanding India’s experience on social immunity initiatives during the COVID-19 crisis. KEYWORDS:Social immunity, Collective responsibility, COVID-19, Crisis management, interdependence

Системный подход к экономике регионального здравоохранения

Healthcare is one of the branches of the Russian economy. The industry is developing on the terms of commercialization, on the one hand, on the other - it has a pronounced social character. The institutional foundations of the healthcare economy are not fully defined, since the industry has been developing in market conditions over the past 30 years. Fragmentary economic processes and indicators have been studied, but a comprehensive description of the health economics model and an assessment of its functioning has not been formed. A systematic approach can be used for these purposes. As a result of the study, a set of components of the health care economy system at the regional level is proposed that meets the goal of evaluating the effectiveness of health care at the regional level.

Construction of the Enterococcal Strain Expressing Immunogenic Fragment of SARS-Cov-2 Virus

Contemporary SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, besides its dramatic global influence on the human race including health care systems, economies, and political decisions, opened a window for the global experiment with human vaccination employing novel injectable vaccines providing predominantly specific IgG response with little knowledge of their impact on the mucosal immunity. However, it is widely accepted that protection against the pathogens at the gates of the infection - on mucosal surfaces—predominantly rely on an IgA response. Some genetically modified bacteria, including probiotics, represent attractive vehicles for oral or nasal mucosal delivery of therapeutic molecules. Probiotic-based vaccines for mucous membranes are easy to produce in large quantities; they have low cost, provide quite a long T-cell memory, and gut IgA response to oral vaccines is highly synchronized and strongly oligoclonal. Here we present a study demonstrating construction of the novel SARS-Cov-2 vaccine candidate employing the gene fragment of S1 SARS-Cov-2 gene. This DNA fragment was inserted in frame into major pili protein gene with d2 domain of enterococcal operon encoding for pili. The DNA sequencing proved the presence of the insert in enterococcal genome. RNA transcription, immunoprecipitation, and immune electron microscopy with human sera obtained from the SARS-Cov-2 patients demonstrated expression of SARS-Cov-2 antigens in bacteria. Taken together the data obtained allowed considering this genetically modified probiotic strain as an interesting candidate for vaccine against SARS-Cov-2.

Construction of the Enterococcal Strain Expressing Immunogenic Fragment of SARS-Cov-2 Virus

Contemporary SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, besides its dramatic global influence on the human race including health care systems, economies, and political decisions, opened a window for the global experiment with human vaccination employing novel injectable vaccines providing predominantly specific IgG response with little knowledge of their impact on the mucosal immunity. However, it is widely accepted that protection against the pathogens at the gates of the infection - on mucosal surfaces—predominantly rely on an IgA response. Some genetically modified bacteria, including probiotics, represent attractive vehicles for oral or nasal mucosal delivery of therapeutic molecules. Probiotic-based vaccines for mucous membranes are easy to produce in large quantities; they have low cost, provide quite a long T-cell memory, and gut IgA response to oral vaccines is highly synchronized and strongly oligoclonal. Here we present a study demonstrating construction of the novel SARS-Cov-2 vaccine candidate employing the gene fragment of S1 SARS-Cov-2 gene. This DNA fragment was inserted in frame into major pili protein gene with d2 domain of enterococcal operon encoding for pili. The DNA sequencing proved the presence of the insert in enterococcal genome. RNA transcription, immunoprecipitation, and immune electron microscopy with human sera obtained from the SARS-Cov-2 patients demonstrated expression of SARS-Cov-2 antigens in bacteria. Taken together the data obtained allowed considering this genetically modified probiotic strain as an interesting candidate for vaccine against SARS-Cov-2.

Rehabilitation Care at the Time of Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) Pandemic: A Scoping Review of Health System Recommendations.

Purpose: The coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2 has imposed a significant burden on health care systems, economies, and social systems in many countries around the world. The provision of rehabilitation services for persons with active COVID-19 infection poses challenges to maintaining a safe environment for patients and treating providers.Materials and Methods: Established frameworks were used to guide the scoping review methodology. Medline, Embase, Pubmed, CINAHL databases from inception to August 1, 2020, and prominent rehabilitation organizations’ websites were searched.Study Selection: We included articles and reports if they were focused on rehabilitation related recommendations for COVID-19 patients, treating providers, or the general population.Data Extraction: Pairs of team members used a pre-tested data abstraction form to extract data from included full-text articles. The strength and the quality of the extracted recommendations were evaluated by two reviewers using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach.Results: We retrieved 6,468 citations, of which 2,086 were eligible for review, after duplicates were removed. We excluded 1,980 citations based on title and abstract screening. Of the screened full-text articles, we included all 106 studies. A summary of recommendations is presented. We assessed the overall evidence to be strong and of fair quality.Conclusion: The rehabilitation setting, and processes, logistics, and patient and healthcare provider precaution recommendations identified aim to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection and ensure adequate and safe rehabilitation services, whether face-to-face or through teleservices. The COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly changing. Further updates will be needed over time in order to incorporate emerging best evidence into rehabilitation guidelines.