In the last decades, healthcare systems around the world have been subjected to increasing attempts to extend the realm of control by private interests over healthcare funding and delivery – what we could term ‘healthcare privatisation’. These attempts had two important consequences: an increase in inequalities of access to services and the rising segmentation of healthcare labour markets. While policy-makers have increasingly placed issues of healthcare access and workforce on their agenda, they eschewed the question of their link to privatisation, and of their implication for social justice in the delivery of and access to services, in favour of the question of their implications for cost-control.
On the other hand, academic knowledge on these issues has been dispersed among various disciplinary interests and perspectives, reproducing thus the fragmented view of policy-generated knowledge. While anthropology has moved in the last decades into studying policy processes and the impact of neoliberal reforms, its holistic perspective still awaits to be applied in an encompassing manner to the various transformations induced by healthcare privatisation. The need is thus for asking new questions and for making new links among what have been seen as discrete phenomena (i.e. healthcare privatisation, inequalities of access, segmented labour markets). In the process, anthropologists also have to question their theoretical and methodological stances and their contribution to revealing or masking these links.
Papers in the panel are encouraged to look at these issues from national as well as transnational perspectives.