Triage As Mediating Technology to Reinvent Infrastructures of Care

• In Event: Assembling Caring Geographies: How do Regions Care?

Abstract

With the growing ageing population in the Netherlands, the infrastructures of care seem to experience increasing rush hours in the upcoming years. In some Dutch regions, the intensification of care goes hand in hand with a shortage of skilled health workers, specialized in complex care for the elderly. To overcome workloads and prevent unnecessary transferences of elderly patients’, policy guidelines regarding ‘care at the right place’ are becoming vastly significant. To provide this patient-centered care, health organizations seek regional cooperation. One of the solutions is that medical teams are no longer fixed to one care center, but adaptively switch between one place and another, as flexible actors in a network (Oldenhof et al. 2016). To support this re-placement of health professionals, care centers have introduced the instrument of triage in their organizations. In this paper, we examine how health professionals reinvent and rebuild infrastructures of care in the region through the co-construction of triage (Bal & Pieters 2019). We uncover how triage is used as a mediating technology to transcend and reconfigure professional boundaries (Oudshoorn 2011, Tjora 2002). In doing so, we will draw on theories and concepts from geography and STS such as re-placement; distances; proximity; time and speed, to understand what triage does to sociological, political and geographical infrastructure(s) of place and care.

Author

• Nienke van Pijkeren, Erasmus University (Institute of Health Policy & Management)