A movement for common care

Healthcare is unsustainable

The demand for healthcare services has been growing over recent decades. The medicalisation of suffering and the increase in chronic conditions and premature death—related to the degradation in socioeconomic and environmental conditions of living—have made a patient out of almost everyone. Healthcare’s remit is ever increasing. Now, clinicians must screen for social and biomedical risk factors, manage pre-disease states, respond to signals from remote behavioural surveillance devices, certify ailments and disabilities, and, of course, diagnose, treat, palliate, and rehabilitate.

Healthcare organisations are responding to this growing demand with increasing levels of industrialisation: efficiently processing people, treating them according to protocols while limiting access through triage, automatisation, and administrative hindrances. These efforts have produced pathologies of care,1 such as cruel delays to accessing care, onerous administrative tasks, “not our job” frustrations when navigating the system, and hurried conversations that result in generic (care for patients like this rather than for this patient) and …