Wednesday March 19 at 10 am

room 0.38, UvH

Jason Rodriquez is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, in Boston. Jason has repeatedly visited the UvH before and also stayed with us as visiting scholar. He is a medical sociologist who specializes in the moral dilemmas of work in the healthcare industry of the United States. His research has examined the experiences of  groups across the occupational spectrum of the healthcare industry, from nursing assistants to the medical directors of intensive care units.

In this talk he will discuss key findings from his forthcoming book, On the Frontlines of Crisis: Intensive Care and the Challenge of COVID-19. The book takes readers into the heart of two Massachusetts ICUs that were overwhelmed with critically ill patients during the peak of the pandemic. It shows how the dramatic spike in mental health distress among healthcare workers was not just a consequence of the pandemic, but also the result of changing dynamics within the healthcare system itself. These dynamics have profound implications for the future of healthcare work, shown in this case through the prism of a crisis in which workers were left unprepared and at times unprotected, as they struggled to care for waves upon waves of incurable patients.