Our paper explores how legal status stratification shapes the health and health care of low-income patients with chronic illnesses in the U.S. healthcare safety net. Drawing on data from over two years of ethnographic fieldwork at urban safety-net clinics, we examine e fforts by Complex Care Management (CCM) teams to stabilize patients with uncontrolled chronic illnesses through primary care-integrated support. We show that stratified citizenship and geographic variability correspond to different possibilities for health care. We suggest an approach to immigration as a structural determinant of health that accounts for the complex, stratified, and changing nature of citizenship status. We also highlight how geographical differences and interactions among local, state, and federal policies support the notion that citizenship is stratified across multiple tiers with distinctive possibilities and constraints for health. While county-based health plans at each of the study sites include residents with varying legal status, lack of formal legal status remains a substantial obstacle to care. Many immigrants are unable to take full advantage of primary and specialty care, resulting in unnecessary morbidity and mortality. In some cases, patients have returned to their country of origin to die. While CCM teams provide an impressive level of support to assist immigrant patients in navigating healthcare and immigration bureaucracies, legal and geographic stratification limit their ability to address broader aspects of these patients’ social context.
Hospitals throughout the United States are implementing new forms of care delivery meant to address social needs for structurally vulnerable patients as a strategy to prevent emergency department visits and hospitalizations and to thereby reduce costs. This article examines how the deployment of social assistance within a neoliberal institutional logic involves the negotiation and alignment of economistic values with ethics of care. We focus on care practices meant to stabilize the socioeconomic conditions of the most expensive patients in the health care system—the “super‐utilizers”—through the provisioning of basic resources such as housing, food, transportation, and social support. These patients typically suffer from multiple chronic illnesses accompanied by conditions of poverty, housing and food insecurity, exposure to violence and trauma, and associated substance use and mental health problems. We offer an account of how practices of social assistance are being forged within contexts defined by neoliberal governance.
Transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals encounter a multitude of barriers to accessing clinically and culturally competent health care. One strategy to increase the quality and competence of care delivery is workplace trainings. This study describes a community-based program for the evaluation of this type of training. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research team assessed the effectiveness of three competency trainings administered by a local nonprofit organization in the Northwest United States. Quantitative data indicated a significant shift in self-assessed knowledge associated with completion of the training. Qualitative data confirmed this result and revealed a number of important themes about the effect of the trainings on providers and their ability to implement knowledge and skills in practice. Clinical considerations are proposed for providers who seek similar trainings and who aim to increase clinical and cultural competency in delivering care to transgender and gender-nonconforming patients and clients.
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