Waiting Times

In a world characterised by 'poly crisis', two major crises stand out: a crisis of time and a crisis of care. This open access 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.

Waiting times within the UK National Health Service (NHS) have been at historic levels through and since the Covid-19 pandemic. Although this sense of a crisis of waiting is culturally and historically specific, it casts important light on the 'crisis' of welfare structures across the Global North. Such a crisis in waiting times brings both a call for judgment and a call to action.

This book argues that all healthcare entails waiting and other forms of elongated time, such as pausing to observe, staying alongside patients at end of life, or stopping treatment as an ethical intervention. Instead of trying to 'solve' the crisis of the NHS by moving people more quickly through the system, reallocating time to address 'shortfalls' to reduce waits to access care, or even abandoning the social commitment to a universal service, the authors argue that it is vital to pay attention, first, to how time and care continue to be made in the current system. It is only by reckoning with the essential 'untimeliness' of care that we might then be able to conceptualise interventions in the NHS that are 'timely' and that sustain its social mission.

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.