cfp.english.upenn.edu

1st Global Conference
Making Sense Of: 'Care' in Health Care

Monday 15th February - Wednesday 17th February 2010
The Women’s College, Sydney, Australia

In association with the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Sydney

Call for Papers
The term Health Care denotes “the treatment and management of illness and the preservation of health through services offered by medical, dental, nursing and allied health profession” (Wikipedia, January 2009). The organization of such services constitutes the health care system of a given society. ‘Health Care’ is thus an umbrella term that subsumes policies, institutions, and a comprehensive work force of professions and occupations, both ‘hands on’ and administrative. Importantly, ‘Health Care’ also carries connotations of attitudes, ideologies, cultural values and community expectations that are implicated, not always harmoniously, in the dynamics of modern health care systems. While health care systems are concerned with the provision of services, the broad social domain of health care practices involves, equally significantly, the consumption of such service and the beliefs and activities of the consumers (or ‘clients’, a more popular term recently). ‘Health Care’ is thus everyone’s concern. We all care about health care.

This inter- and multi-disciplinary project seeks to address the meanings, the role and the realities of the term ‘Care’ as used in conjunction with practices that relate to health and illness matters. The questions that are relevant to such a project concern ideology as much as they do policies and actions. As such, they also touch on the correspondence, or lack thereof, between desirable (’caring’) models of practice and actual activities at the coal-face of work in the health systems of contemporary societies.

We have identified a number of core themes for our first conference. Out of our deliberations at this time it is anticipated that the project will develop further and cross-fertilise with other research within Inter-Disciplinary.Net.

* Analysing ‘Care’ - origins and cultural significance of the term
* Tracing the history of ‘Care’ in ‘Health Care’
* ‘Care’ as ideology and/or theory
* ‘Care’ and the ‘health care professions’
* ‘Care’ in medicine, nursing and the allied professions
* Who cares?
* The objects of care for managers and administrators in Health Care
* Barriers in the way of ‘care’
* Failures in ‘the duty of care’ under modern conditions
* Exercising ‘care’ and being ‘caring’; can both be done simultaneously?
* Care in the ‘community’
* Professionalism and care
* What price compassion?

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 14th August 2009. If your paper is accepted for presentation at the conference, an 8 page draft paper should be submitted by Friday 15th January 2010.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs
Heather McKenzie
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Email: hmckenzie@nursing.usyd.edu.au

Maria Vaccarella
Marie-Curie Research Fellow, King’s College, London
Hub Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Email: maria.vaccarella@inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
Email: chc@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the Making Sense Of: Hub series of ongoing research and publications projects conferences, run within the Probing the Boundaries domain which aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration.

All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.

For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of...

For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of...