Adrienne Strong

Medical anthropology, hospital ethnography, theories of care, pain care practices, and maternal mortality

I am a medical anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida and affiliate faculty with the Center for African Studies and the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, with a joint Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, USA and the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I have long studied maternal mortality and women's health in Tanzania, focusing on theories of care for pregnant women. In my new NSF funded research (2022-2025), I am examining the meanings and formation of pain care practices in Tanzania across multiple levels in two regions, including the national Ocean Road Cancer Institute and Tosamaganga District Hospital. The common threads between all of my projects are interests in theories of care, everyday ethics, hospital ethnography, bio bureaucracy and the expansion of biomedical care and power, and patient-provider interactions. I supervise Ph.D. students interested in maternal and reproductive health, hospital ethnography, and the anthropology of biomedicine in a variety of geographic locations. I will be on parental leave until the end of October 2023. If you are interested in applying to UF to work with me, please send me an email.

Before my current position, I was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Columbia University's Mailman School of Health, in the Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) Program in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and a Fellow at the Columbia Population Research Center.

My first book, winner of the 2021 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA), Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania, available from University of California Press November 3, 2020, focuses on the inner workings of a government regional referral hospital in Tanzania, examining how institutional structures related to hierarchy, bureaucracy, historical precedents, communication and other factors, may influence the capacity of the institution to provide effective maternal healthcare during times of obstetric crisis. My research focuses on biomedical healthcare providers and administrators, groups that are often overlooked in the context of medical anthropology in sub-Saharan Africa. I contextualize the hospital ethnography with interviews, participant observation, and focus group discussions in communities throughout the region, as well as through the use of primary archival sources from the colonial and post-independence eras. This is the first ethnography to examine the issue of maternal mortality in a low resource setting from this perspective and in the setting of a biomedical facility, complementing the existing work of anthropologists of reproduction who have worked at the community level.

I worked in the Rukwa Region for my PhD fieldwork, which I conducted from January 2014- August 2015. From September 2010 through July 2011, I conducted research on access to healthcare services during pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period in the Singida Region of Tanzania. For my postdoctoral research in 2017 and 2018 I conducted a project examining a birth companion pilot program in the Kigoma region of Tanzania, which focused on how companions impact the social dynamics of health center maternity wards and the care provided in those settings. This project also included an 80-question cultural consensus survey and analysis around the cultural domain of care and support for pregnant women.

This is my personal website, which includes updates on my research, collaborations, conference presentations and papers, publications, teaching, and critical responses to current events related to women's health and reproduction.

Mentions and Public Anthropology

Leah M. Ashe Prize for the Anthropology of Medically Induced Harm Honorable Mention 2022

Eileen Basker Memorial Prize 2021

ReproNetwork Adele E. Clarke Book Award Honorable Mention 2021

Paper Prize

Abuse in Childbirth

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/health/report-points-to-rise-in-mistreatment-by-health-workers-during-childbirth.html?ref=health&_r=0 

Several people tagged me in or sent this article to me via Facebook when it was published in the NY Times on June 30th. Shortly thereafter, I was invited to attend a two day meeting here in Dar es Salaam related to Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) and how it can be further incorporated into the activities already in place by NGOs, the Tanzanian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, and organizations such as USAID. I was included by the invitation of the head of a multi-NGO project and I was really the only person there who was not affiliated with a large organization. Abuse during childbirth, or what is being called, perhaps more positively, Respectful Maternity Care, has interested me since the first time I was in a Tanzanian labor ward and knew enough Swahili to understand what was being said. Some of the abuse isn't verbal and it's clear what is happening even without knowing the language. The article in the Times was basically a short press release about a new review article that was recently published. The original journal article sought to review a number of previously published studies in an attempt to define and count what the authors more generally called mistreatment during childbirth. 

In the meeting, we heard presentations on projects that have been done in Kenya and Tanzania both to describe the extent of mistreatment during childbirth, as well as interventions that have been meant to improve the interactions between providers and women. We discussed the "drivers" of the abusive or disrespectful behavior, public health speak for motivating factors. Basically, the behaviors can be explained in a number of ways, with major factors in Tanzania being things like severe staff shortages and burden of work, nurses who don't have sufficient skills when faced with a difficult delivery, who then resort to hitting patients or yelling at them to "make the baby come out," and the normalization of poor treatment that is transferred from older, more experienced nurses to those who have recently graduated, to name a few. On the community side, there is a lack of avenues for addressing complaints in a safe and anonymous way, as well as a lack of knowledge about what is and is not appropriate treatment by providers in the health care setting. The people from USAID, particularly from the Washington DC offices, were framing the issue in the language of human rights. Now, while I don't have any problem with this and do, personally, believe that women have a right to respectful and dignified care that is culturally appropriate, I was wondering whether or not that rhetoric really resonates with community members here. I only say this because, during a couple focus group discussions we did in the villages, people complained about the concept of human rights and the rights of the child. They saw these ideas as taking away some of their autonomy as parents, as a way for the state to claim ownership of their children and push its way into their families. I do, however, think it's important to discuss with men, women, and community leaders so that they are aware when providers are not behaving at the highest level of care and ethics. 

Another issue is in the training of healthcare providers. We discussed modifying the curriculum for nursing students but it seems to me that one of the biggest challenges is when nursing students start doing practicals in hospitals. That's where they learn and are enculturated into this system and mode of behavior. If you see all of the older, experienced nurses doing it, it makes sense that you might think it was actually acceptable in practice, even if your textbook said it's not. I've seen it in action and it's nearly impossible for newer nurses to resist assimilating onto the maternity ward in this way, even if they never yelled at or were disrespectful to any patient on a different ward. I had one nurse tell me that when she first started on maternity, she was determined to not yell at or hit patients but she "quickly learned you had to hit them and yell at them sometimes to make them give birth." Nurses often explain this to me by saying that women in labor, especially the second stage, when they are pushing, are not in their right minds and don't always listen well or know what they are doing. Therefore, to cut through that and make the woman pay attention and push the baby out, they yell or hit her or are otherwise forceful. 

The disrespect goes beyond those issues of physical and verbal abuse to more subtle forms of abuse such as denying privacy, not giving sufficient explanations necessary for obtaining consent, and not providing women with information about taking care of themselves and their baby after birth. 

In one area of Tanzania, they were experimenting with the use of a Patient Rights Charter. The charter included the rights and responsibilities of both the patients and the providers. In the district hospital where the organization was using the charter, they cited an increase in patient satisfaction and perceived quality of care. One of the reasons this issue is perceived of as so important is because nearly half of women in places like Tanzania are still not making it to health facilities to give birth, putting them at greater risk if they develop complications, and contributing to a rather stubborn maternal mortality rate that hasn't really seen any significant reductions in recent years. The thought is that with more respectful care, women will be more likely to avail themselves of biomedical healthcare, facility-based services. We discussed some other ideas for improving care and fostering respect, including encouraging birth companions, which are thought to be a very powerful tool for reducing disrespect and abuse that doesn't require a multi-prong approach. The problem with this is that the infrastructure of most places in Tanzania just will not accommodate this. Perhaps in dispensaries or health centers that see only a few births per month, but district and regional hospitals are often so overcrowded already that the thought of where a birth companion for every woman would go is enough to make most doctors, nurses, and administrators dismiss the idea out of hand. There just physically isn't any place to put more people in many labor wards and even in ante or post-natal rooms where, in Sumbawanga, women were nearly always sharing a bed with at least one other woman. The idea behind birth companions is that they would act as an advocate and a watchdog for the woman. They would be able to make sure she is getting attention and care, as well as being able to deter or report any instances of disrespect and abuse. I think this will also only be truly effective if these people, the companions, also know the rights of women and the best ways to interface with the hospital system and its procedures. Otherwise, as I've seen happen, it's possible the companion could even become complicit in the abuse, allowing it to happen because they think it is being done by the nurses in order to help the woman giving birth. 

I'll just end with a link to this article, which is a heartbreaking look at a maternity ward in India that chronicles the abuse that is all too common in many places throughout the world.  

http://scroll.in/article/729784/does-better-healthcare-for-indian-mothers-mean-abusing-and-hitting-them

 

Birth is a Dream Project

I'm always happy to come across something that I don't have to be overly critical about. These beautiful photographs do a far better job than I ever could of documenting health care for pregnant women in Africa. Even though none of the photos are from Tanzania, many of the images remind me of the women and nurses I see every day here. I hope you all enjoy! While documenting some of the difficult conditions in the countries in which the photos were taken, the experience is a universal one and I hope some of these pictures can serve to remind us all that pregnancy can be a time of joy and anxiety for just about everyone.

The first link is to the Huffington Post article and the second is for the project's website.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/05/paolo-patruno_n_6101602.html

http://www.birthisadream.org

 

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