The book is called "The Birth of the Patient: Multiple Entities of Newborns in Russian Neonatal Care". Analyzing documents, semi-structured as well as expert interviews with healthcare professionals, focus groups and employing participant observation and self-observation methodologies, Anastasia Novkunskaya , Artemy Minakov and Anna Klepikova examine the structure of the neonatal care system using the example of one of the Russian regions.
Newborn patients requiring intensive care are a special category. They do not yet have a biography in the usual sense and the risk of adverse outcomes is high. Newborns are not socially and physically autonomous, and their agency is limited. The treatment trajectories of such patients provide an example of how medical institutions are structured and what place the patient occupies in it.
One of the project's goals was to give doctors and nurses, who sometimes work in very difficult conditions, a "voice", a platform to articulate their concerns. Some of the book's topics are:
- How did neonatal care develop in Russia?
- How do institutional conditions, biomedical and bureaucratic processes shape the social position of newborn patients?
- How, in the "extended patient" and “emotional work” spheres, do neonatal service specialists interact with children's parents?
Related articles:
- Birth of the patient: (De)medicalization of newborns in the organizational contexts of neonatal services
- "Paper Body": Bureaucratic and Legal Dimensions of the Newborn Patient's Trajectory in Neonatology
Congratulations to our colleagues on the release of the book!
Photo: Andrey Tolokonnikov. In the frame is Artemy Minakov, neonatologist-resuscitator, researcher at Institute of Interdisciplinary Medical Research and one of the authors of the book