African Immigrant Care Workers & COVID in the US: Their Fears, Protections, and Recalibrations

By Cati Coe

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

The US healthcare system depends on the labor of immigrant healthcare professionals, a fact mainly unrecognized and unreported during the pandemic. Twenty-eight percent of physicians are foreign-born, as are 22 percent of nursing assistants (Batalova 2020). The immigrant professionals make up even more of the workforce in healthcare positions that are undervalued, in comparison to what is considered skilled medical …

Features

April 2, 2019

Disrupted connections: On participation in caring for a mother with dementia

By Tanja Ahlin

On a sunny, stifling afternoon, my friend, an Ayurvedic doctor, ushers me into a scantily furnished examining room of his clinic in central Kerala, South India. There, a small, stout woman sits on a chair. Her name is Mercy.¹ She is wearing a salwar kameez, an outfit comprising of a long shirt, baggy pants and a scarf, rather …

Somatosphere

Science, Medicine, and Anthropology

A collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.

Tag Archives: elderly care

African Immigrant Care Workers & COVID in the US: Their Fears, Protections, and Recalibrations

Disrupted connections: On participation in caring for a mother with dementia