Waiting Times

This book investigates what it means to wait in and for healthcare in an era when care is politicised and rationed and time is lived at increasingly different and complex tempos.

This open access book investigates waiting as one of healthcare’s core experiences. Waiting is there in the time it takes to access services; the uncertain temporalities of diagnosis and treatment; and in the elongated time-frames of recovery, relapse, remission, and dying. Yet it can be felt to be intolerable when we are in need of care and when we want to offer timely care. This book investigates both the difficulties and vital significance of waiting in and for practices of care.
Waiting times in many health services across the Global North have been at historic levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. Although this crisis of waiting is culturally and historically specific, Covid-19 made visible broader questions about the relationship between waiting, time, and care, and the fate of welfare infrastructures. Who waits for (and on) whom? If all care entails forms of elongated time, what waiting do we want to eliminate, and what waiting needs to be noticed, supported, and preserved as an offer and practice of care?
This book takes the UK National Health Service (NHS) as a particular site of collective waiting and caring. The authors argue that care is not straightforwardly aligned with the time of production, progress, or growth, but is bound instead to the chronicity of practices that sustain interdependence: pausing to assess what is needed, staying alongside suffering, and returning to sites of vulnerability. Cutting across the marketization, provision rationalization, ideas of crisis, and the linear models of time that can dominate health and welfare policies, this book reckons with care’s essential ‘untimeliness’. By moving away from the idea that waiting is merely a form of service failure or abandonment, the authors trace out a more complex understanding of how ‘timely’ care might be offered, made, and sustained.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.