"Housing Is Health Care": Treating Homelessness in Safety-net Hospitals.

As medicine integrates social and structural determinants into health care, some health workers redefine housing as medical treatment. This article discusses how health workers in two U.S. urban safety-net hospitals worked with patients without stable housing. We observed ethnographically how health workers helped patients seek housing in a sharply stratified housing economy. Analyzing in-depth interviews and observations, we show how health workers: (1) understood housing as health care and navigated limits of individual care in a structurally produced housing crisis; and (2) developed and enacted practices of biomedical and sociopolitical stabilization, including eligibilizing and data-tracking work. We discuss how health workers bridged individually focused techniques of clinical care with structural critiques of stratified housing economies despite contradictions in this approach. Finally, we analyze the implications of providers' extension of medical stabilization into social, economic, and political realms, even as they remained caught in the structural dynamics they sought to address.

Caring for "Super-utilizers": Neoliberal Social Assistance in the Safety-net.

Hospitals throughout the United States are implementing new forms of care delivery meant to address social needs for structurally vulnerable patients as a strategy to prevent emergency department visits and hospitalizations and to thereby reduce costs. This article examines how the deployment of social assistance within a neoliberal institutional logic involves the negotiation and alignment of economistic values with ethics of care. We focus on care practices meant to stabilize the socioeconomic conditions of the most expensive patients in the health care system-the "super-utilizers"-through the provisioning of basic resources such as housing, food, transportation, and social support. These patients typically suffer from multiple chronic illnesses accompanied by conditions of poverty, housing and food insecurity, exposure to violence and trauma, and associated substance use and mental health problems. We offer an account of how practices of social assistance are being forged within contexts defined by neoliberal governance.

Complex care and contradictions of choice in the safety net.

This article explores the complicated and often-contradictory notions of choice at play in complex care management (CCM) programmes in the US healthcare safety net. Drawing from longitudinal data collected over two years of ethnographic fieldwork at urban safety-net clinics, our study examines the CCM goal of transforming frequent emergency department (ED) utilisers into 'active' patients who will reduce their service utilisation and thereby contribute to a more rational, cost-effective healthcare system. By considering our data alongside philosopher Annemarie Mol's (2008) conceptualisation of the competing logics of choice and care, we argue that these premises often undermine CCM teams' efforts to support patients and provide the care they need - not only to prevent medical crises, but to overcome socio-economic barriers as well. We assert that while safety-net CCM programmes are held accountable for the degree to which their patients successfully transform into self-managing, cost-effective actors, much of the care CCM staff provide in fact involves attempts to intervene on structural obstacles that impinge on patient choice. CCM programmes thus struggle between an economic imperative to get patients to make better health choices and a moral imperative to provide care in the face of systemic societal neglect. (A virtual abstract of this paper can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_979cmCmR9rLrKuD7z0ycA).

First do No harm: Medical legal violence and immigrant health in Coral County, USA.

Contemporary U.S. health and immigration policies exclude millions of noncitizens from healthcare coverage. Growing scholarship emphasizes legal status as a technology of social exclusion and determinant of health, but few studies capture the effects of recent policy uncertainty on noncitizen health. By examining the case of Coral County (a pseudonym), I highlight the challenges facing safety-net clinics and their noncitizen patients making life and death decisions amidst uncertainty before and after the 2016 presidential election. Observational and interview data with patients, clinic workers, and community partners (n = 27) revealed that growing anxiety over federal immigration policies altered clinical risk calculations through a process I refer to as "medical legal violence" (MLV). Whereas previous risk negotiation strategies leveraged bureaucratic routines to elevate imminent threats of illness and/or injury in health decisions, heightened immigration enforcement under the Trump administration shifted the balance in clinical risk calculations toward social risks of detention, deportation, and family separation. This transformed clinical care in Coral County by turning trusted medical-legal bureaucracies into potential tools for federal biopolitical surveillance of immigrant patients, blocking healthcare pathways and increasing patients' fear and anxiety.

"In the United States, we say, 'No breastfeeding,' but that is no longer realistic": provider perspectives towards infant feeding among women living with HIV in the United States.

INTRODUCTION: Currently, the United States (U.S.) recommends that infants born to women living with HIV (WLHIV) be fed formula, whereas many low-resource settings follow the World Health Organization's recommendation to exclusively breastfeed with ongoing antiretroviral therapy. Evidence on infant feeding among WLHIV in high-resource countries suggest that these contrasting recommendations create challenges for providers and patients. Our study used multiple methods to understand providers' infant feeding perspectives on caring for their pregnant and post-partum WLHIV in the U.S. METHODS: We sent a survey (n = 93) to providers across the U.S. who have cared for WLHIV. A subset of survey participants opted into a follow-up qualitative interview (n = 21). These methods allowed us to capture a broad understanding of provider attitudes via the survey and more nuanced qualitative interviews. The study was completed prior to an updated breastfeeding section of the U.S. Perinatal Guidelines. RESULTS: The majority of providers (66.7%) discussed infant feeding intent with their patients using open-ended questions. Many also discussed alternative feeding methods (37.6%) and disclosure avoidance strategies (34.4%). Over 75% (95% confidence interval (CI): 65.1 to 84.2) of participants reported that a WLHIV asked if she could breastfeed her child, and 29% (95% CI 20 to 40.3) reported caring for a patient who breastfed despite recommendations against breastfeeding. Providers reported that their patients' primary concern was stigma associated with not breastfeeding (58%), while providers were primarily concerned about medication adherence during breastfeeding (70%). Through qualitative analysis, four overarching categories emerged that reflect providers' sentiments, including (1) U.S. guidelines inadequately addressing WLHIV's desire to breastfeed; (2) negotiating patient autonomy amidst complex feeding situations; (3) harm reduction approaches to supporting WLHIV in breastfeeding; and (4) providers anticipating multilayered patient stigmatization. CONCLUSIONS: The majority of provider respondents cared for a WLHIV who desired to breastfeed, and a third had WLHIV who breastfed despite recommendations against it. Providers found that the status of U.S. guidelines and their incongruity with WHO guidelines left them without adequate resources to support WLHIV's infant feeding decisions. Our findings provide important insight to inform professional associations' discussions about public health policy as they consider future directions for infant feeding guidelines among WLHIV.

Stratified citizenship, stratified health: Examining latinx legal status in the U.S. healthcare safety net.

Our paper explores how legal status stratification shapes the health and health care of low-income patients with chronic illnesses in the U.S. healthcare safety net. Drawing on data from over two years of ethnographic fieldwork at urban safety-net clinics, we examine efforts by Complex Care Management (CCM) teams to stabilize patients with uncontrolled chronic illnesses through primary care-integrated support. We show that stratified citizenship and geographic variability correspond to different possibilities for health care. We suggest an approach to immigration as a structural determinant of health that accounts for the complex, stratified, and changing nature of citizenship status. We also highlight how geographical differences and interactions among local, state, and federal policies support the notion that citizenship is stratified across multiple tiers with distinctive possibilities and constraints for health. While county-based health plans at each of the study sites include residents with varying legal status, lack of formal legal status remains a substantial obstacle to care. Many immigrants are unable to take full advantage of primary and specialty care, resulting in unnecessary morbidity and mortality. In some cases, patients have returned to their country of origin to die. While CCM teams provide an impressive level of support to assist immigrant patients in navigating healthcare and immigration bureaucracies, legal and geographic stratification limit their ability to address broader aspects of these patients' social context.

Like a Fish out of Water: Managing Chronic Pain in the Urban Safety Net.

The subjective nature of pain has always rendered it a point of entry for power and corresponding stratifying processes within biomedicine. The opioid crisis has further exacerbated these challenges by increasing the stakes of prescribing decisions for providers, which in turn has resulted in greater treatment disparities. Using the theoretical frame of cultural health capital (CHC) to account for these disparities in pain management as they unfold at both the macro- and the microlevel, we present findings from an interdisciplinary study of two complex care management programs in urban safety-net hospitals that serve high-utilizing patients. CHC, which considers the ways in which patient-provider interactions reflect and often reinforce broader social inequities, allows for a consideration of power as it circulates through and beyond the patient-provider encounter. Within the current sociopolitical era of pain management, attention must be paid to the stratifying processes that structure how suffering is addressed.

Patient engagement at the margins: Health care providers' assessments of engagement and the structural determinants of health in the safety-net.

Increasing "patient engagement" has become a priority for health care organizations and policy-makers seeking to reduce cost and improve the quality of care. While concepts of patient engagement have proliferated rapidly across health care settings, little is known about how health care providers make use of these concepts in clinical practice. This paper uses 20 months of ethnographic and interview research carried out from 2015 to 2016 to explore how health care providers working at two public, urban, safety-net hospitals in the United States define, discuss, and assess patient engagement. We investigate how health care providers describe engagement for high cost patients-the "super-utilizers" of the health care system-who often face complex challenges related to socioeconomic marginalization including poverty, housing insecurity, exposure to violence and trauma, cognitive and mental health issues, and substance use. The health care providers in our study faced institutional pressure to assess patient engagement and to direct care towards engaged patients. However, providers considered such assessments to be highly challenging and oftentimes inaccurate, particularly because they understood low patient engagement to be the result of difficult socioeconomic conditions. Providers tried to navigate the demand to assess patient engagement in care by looking for explicit positive and negative indicators of engagement, while also being sensitive to more subtle and intuitive signs of engagement for marginalized patients.

Defining trauma in complex care management: Safety-net providers' perspectives on structural vulnerability and time.

In this paper, we delineate how staff of two complex care management (CCM) programs in urban safety net hospitals in the United States understand trauma. We seek to (1) describe how staff in CCM programs talk about trauma in their patients' lives; (2) discuss how trauma concepts allow staff to understand patients' symptoms, health-related behaviors, and responses to care as results of structural conditions; and (3) delineate the mismatch between long-term needs of patients with histories of trauma and the short-term interventions that CCM programs provide. Observation and interview data gathered between February 2015 and August 2016 indicate that CCM providers define trauma expansively to include individual experiences of violence such as childhood abuse and neglect or recent assault, traumatization in the course of accessing health care and structural violence. Though CCM staff implement elements of trauma-informed care, the short-term design of CCM programs puts pressure on the staff to titrate their efforts, moving patients towards graduation or discharge. Trauma concepts enable clinicians to name structural violence in clinically legitimate language. As such, trauma-informed care and structural competency approaches can complement each other.