AbstractsMedical & Health Science

Misfits: An ethnographic study of extremely fat patients in intensive care

by Caroline Hales




Institution: Victoria University of Wellington
Department:
Year: 2015
Keywords: Fatness; Intensive care; Ethnography; Obesity; Nursing; Medicine; Emotional labour; Facework; Behavioural regions; Focused ethnography
Record ID: 1308683
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10063/4155


Abstract

Critically ill fat patients pose considerable healthcare delivery and resource utilisation challenges which are often exacerbated by the patients’ critical condition and types of interventional therapies used in the intensive care environment. Added to these difficulties of managing care is the social stigma that is attached to being fat. Intensive care staff not only have to attend to the specific needs of the critically ill body but also navigate, both personally and professionally, the social terrain of stigma when providing care to this patient population. The purpose of this research was to explore the culture and influences within the intensive care setting in which doctors and nurses cared for fat patients. A focused ethnographic approach was adopted to elicit the specific knowledge and ‘situated’ experiences of caring for critically ill fat patients from the perspectives of intensive care staff. The setting for this study was an 18 bedded tertiary intensive care unit (ICU) in New Zealand. Participant observation of care practices and interviews with intensive care staff were undertaken over a four month period. This study adopted an insider perspective throughout the research process as the study site was also my place of work. The dual tensions of the nurse and researcher position are reflexively explored through the thesis. Key findings from this research reveal how fat patients were considered to be ‘misfits’ in the ICU as a result of not fitting the physical, medical, and social norms of intensive care practices. Staff managed their private perceptions of fatness during care situations through the use of emotional labour, behavioural regions, and face-work. Through the construction and presentation of the professional and private ‘face’, staff were able to establish positive social experiences for fat patients. This study has brought new understandings of fatness; often percieved as the last socially accepted form of discrimination. Conceptualising fat patients as ‘misfits’ in the intensive care setting, reveals the performances of staff in managing the social awkwardness of fat stigma. The implications of this for healthcare is the provision of clinical services that are fit for purpose and a reconceptualisation of how staff use emotional labour in order to deliver non-discriminatory care to socially stigmatised fat patients.