What does it mean to wait now? What does it mean to care now?
None of us want to wait for healthcare. We need healthcare when we feel unwell, or anxious, or are pain. Waiting, in these situations, can feel like an agony or as if no-one cares.
Yet many health practices involve waiting: from the ‘watchful waiting’ that a GP may use in order to work out what is really wrong, to the slow time of psychotherapy for mental health difficulties, to the waiting that is an integral part of care at the end of our lives. With the wider crisis in care work, the waiting time needed for care is also under threat.
Waiting, then, might be something we want to decrease in some situations and increase in others.
Waiting Times is developing a critical, historical, and culturally relevant response to these questions about waiting and care.
We are talking to health professionals, patients, and many different publics, asking what it means to wait and to care in times dominated by acceleration, immediacy, and political short-termism.
Waiting Times offers a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the relation between time and care in contemporary thinking about health, illness, and wellbeing.
