December 5th 2023 HCN research seminar

Details below for the next event in the UCL Health Communication Network’s seminar series on 5^th December 2023, 1-2pm

Location: IOE – 20 Bedford Way, Room C3.14

Live stream link for those who can’t attend: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/93217430863?pwd=dXVxdTN0YkpwWVBNQ1IrVitaTCs4UT09 (Passcode: 42135)

 

Talks:

• Incorporating a “widening participation” agenda? Language-related considerations in patient recruitment to randomised trials
  Talia Isaacs (Institute of Education department of Culture, Communication and Media), on behalf of the “Beyond must speak English” project

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how some groups in society experience greater disease burden and poorer health outcomes than the wider population. Such societal inequalities have always existed, but there are now arguably more initiatives to begin to address these injustices. This is driven, in part, by agenda-setting from some health research funders to encourage researchers to engage with groups in society that have historically been left behind. This short talk centres on language-related gatekeeping measures when recruiting patients to health intervention research. Highlights from a systematic review of NIHR research reports focusing on UK-based randomised controlled trials (RCTs) expose methodological elements of RCTs that could preclude the participation of ethnically and linguistically diverse patients. This includes considerations of the fairness, accuracy, and consistency of language-related screening during participant recruitment.

 

• Silenced prohibitions in the birth room
  Rebecca Brione is a module co-lead on Legal and Ethical Issues in Women’s Health at UCL, and a part-time doctoral student in the Sowerby Philosophy and Medicine project at King’s College London

We all want to do things with our words. In healthcare, our words can, but do not always, protect our interests in bodily autonomy and integrity. Take vaginal examination in labour, a common intervention involving digital penetration of a pregnant person’s vagina by a healthcarer. In England, absent rare and unusual circumstances, an individual has an absolute right in law say no to this and similar interventions. Too often, however, those “no”s fail. Some describe the resulting experiences as being like rape. This paper uses concepts from applied philosophy of language to examine what might be going wrong in cases where people’s words fail to do what they intend. I set out the different concurrent actions a pregnant person may be (trying to) perform with her words when she says “no”, and argue that, at least in some cases, people are being silenced when they attempt to refuse unwanted examination.