Waiting Times: Crisis, Chronicity and Care (Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities)

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, reallocat