����Ӱ��

The first Inimkond seminar speaker for this semester is Dr. Hubert Wierciński. Dr. Wierciński is a medical anthropologists, based at the University of Warsaw where he functions as the Deputy Director of the Department. See more . 

The lecture takes place on September 22 at 18 o'clock in room M349.

His talk is:  

Healthcare and post-socialism: a case study of primary care in Poland

Post-socialist transition has opened up many new spaces where individuals and institutions form identity and seek agency. However, 27 years after the collapse of Soviet Union, Central Europe still struggles with an astonishing amount of post-transformation slivers, thrusting almost all aspects of socio-cultural and political reality. Healthcare is one of them.

The past two decades in Poland have been a turbulent period of reform in an anachronistic state-provided healthcare system. In 1997 Jerzy`s Buzek’s government decided to implement a profound and controversial reconstruction, reshaping a healthcare system left dysfunctional by its post-socialist past. The reform has fundamentally transformed the financing of primary care, its social role, and its legal, economic, professional, and political contexts. One of the outcomes of the reform was the creation of privatized primary care (podstawowa opieka zdrowotna, POZ). Primary care has been opened up to the free market, turning a number of practitioners into entrepreneurs.

In the lecture I will explore doctors` views and experiences related to the recent socio-politic shift and its consequences: the “freemarketization” and bureaucratization of primary care. Then, I will address the question of doctors` authority, relations of power, and relations with patients in new primary care settings. Finally, I will demonstrate how contrasting medical ideologies – the “traditional”, focused on patients` story and body, and the “modern”, “efficient”, cost-saving, anchored in standardized, technological regimes – clash in contemporary Polish primary care. I suggest that this clash, along with recent changes in government policy, are the main reasons for several major primary care issues; namely, instability in practitioners’ professional identities, difficulties in patient-doctor relations, and disillusionment in primary care practitioners.

Facebook event