The Global Hospital
This collaborative international research project, funded by the SNSF, seeks to offer a novel conceptualisation of hospitals as gendered, globalised spaces of more-than-medical labour and knowledge.
Factsheet
- Schools involved School of Health Professions
- Institute(s) Nursing
- Research unit(s) Field of Innovation – Psychosocial Health
- Funding organisation SNSF
- Duration (planned) 01.01.2026 - 31.12.2029
- Head of project Dr. Julia Rehsmann
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Partner
Prof. Janina Kehr,Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropolgie,Health Matters Research Group,Uni Wien
Prof. Jelena Tosic , Department for Migration Studies, Universität St.Gallen - Keywords hospital, mobility, migration, labour, knowledge, expertise, ethnography, collaborative research, participatory design research
Situation
Labour in the hospital has become a source of much political and economic concern. Our hypothesis is that labour, mobility, and knowledge are entangled in the reproduction of medical care beyond the narrow practice of medical work, but the effects of this entanglement need to be better understood. Hospital research often favours medical professionals and patients. However, the clinical encounter is made possible by mostly female care workers (nurses and healthcare assistants) and maintenance staff (kitchen and cleaning workers) who mediate between practitioners and patients in addition to laying the very groundwork for nursing and medical care to take place. To fill this gap, we ethnographically investigate care and maintenance workers’ everyday labour, migration trajectories, and funds of knowledge in Switzerland and Austria. By focusing simultaneously on both groups, we go beyond the current state of the art that follows professional boundaries.
Course of action
The project is comprised of four subprojects, which will comparatively focus on hospitals in Switzerland and Austria, two bordering, intersecting but also contrasting poles of European health care regimes, as well as two contexts of European and extra-European staff recruitments. At the BFH, subproject A "Entangled care: Everyday knowledge practices and de/valuation of migrant labour in Swiss hospitals" as well as subproject D "Exhibiting entanglements: The global hospital on display" are led by the PI Dr. Julia Rehsmann. In subproject A, a doctoral researcher will explore how everyday practices and interactions of care and maintenance workers become entangled in Swiss hospitals, and how they shape healthcare in the everyday. Subproject D will integrate participatory design research in the last two years of the research project to visualise the contribution of workers to global hospitals. Two other subprojects are located at the University of St.Gallen and the University of Vienna, with Co-PI Prof.Dr. Jelena Tosic (Univ. St.Gallen) leading subproject C: "Dis/entangling routes of labour: Tracing diasporic and recruitment pathways of hospital workers", and Co-PI Prof. Dr. Janina Kehr (Univ. Vienna) conducting subproject B "Inter/mediated entanglements: Reproductive labour, recruiting, and outsourcing in Austrian hospital spaces." All subprojects will collaborate over the course of the research project.
Looking ahead
Our project will thus contribute to understanding the global entanglements of labour, mobility, and knowledge in Swiss and Austrian hospitals from the workers’ perspective as well as their effects abroad (post-Yugoslav region and Colombia).
