Carole Ammann is a postdoctoral mobility fellowship at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam. Currently, she conducts research on globalized fatherhood in Guinea and the Netherlands. Previously, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern where she was involved in a study on social differences in the Swiss healthcare sector.

Panel „Care for Diversity“: Negotiating social differences and power geometries among healthcare professionals in a Swiss hospital

28th May 11.30 – 01.00 pm | Carole Ammann & Susan Thieme

Within the last two decades, social differences within the Swiss health care sector have increased due to the specialization of training, the differentiation, and academisation of nursing, the feminization of medicine, the entry of men into nursing professions, as well as the arrival of foreign-trained nurses and physicians. In addition, a new generation is joining the health sector labour force, and this generation challenges taken-for-granted notions about health professions. Healthcare institutions, on the one hand, profit from and depend on the diversity of their personnel. On the other hand, they need to ensure they are functioning well using processes we call homogenization. In this presentation, we ask how these social differences intersect and how they are negotiated between and among nurses and physicians in the everyday working life within a hospital setting.