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Item Type:Book
Title: Doctors on the Edge: General Practitioners, Health and Learning, in the Inner-City
Author: West, Linden
Abstract: This book focuses on the work of doctors during a period of change and crisis in health care. There is growing anxiety about levels of clinical competence and the appalling breach of trust by Dr Harold Shipman - the Manchester doctor found guilty of murdering 15 patients - has led to a government inquiry into the profession.This book - using in-depth, ''auto/biographical'' research among 25 GPs in the multi-cultural townscape of the inner-city - provides space for their stories about responses to change and uncertainty, as well as the distress of patients. Such responses are to be understood within the doctors'' own life histories and current lifeworlds. Using a ''cultural psychology'', the book documents, in graphic detail, how particular doctors hide behind professional curtains in what remains a ''male'' and competitive world but pay a heavy price in terms of their own emotional well-being.We are presented with illuminating insights into what can be an emotionally immature, gendered and racist world, in which many women doctors feel forced to do the emotional labour both at work and home, and where racism still pervades the profession. This is a milieu in which cultural and emotional literacy can be disparaged in the name of hard medical science. Yet some of those on the professional margins may also be at a cutting edge of all that is life-enhancing in their profession.
Publisher Free Association Books Limited
ISBN 9781853435225
Date 2001-00-00 2001
Language en
Short Title Doctors on the Edge
# of Pages 230