Care during exceptional times: results of the CUIDAR study on the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile

This article presents some results of "CUIDAR;study on times, forms, and spaces of care at home during the pandemic," a research project that explored how the pandemic and the subsequent policies implemented by the Chilean government transformed and disrupted the spatialities, temporalities, and practices of care within the households. To do so, we designed a web survey that draws inspiration from care theories emerging from the field of Science and Technology Studies or STS. Such an approach allowed thinking about care as a more-than-human affair that goes beyond a particular moral stance and corresponds more with a doing anchored in the entanglements of human and non-human actors. Data gathered revealed the appearance of new actors while stressing that care is much too relevant and complex to only rest upon specific household members – namely women – who are left to their own devices since policies implemented seem to be unable to support them in the tasks of caring for themselves and others. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR]

How Can Physical Inactivity in Girls Be Explained? A Socioecological Study in Public, Subsidized, and Private Schools.

In the last few years, the World Health Organization has highlighted that physical inactivity is a global issue affecting women to a greater extent than men. Faced with this, different nation states have developed public policies to reduce physical inactivity at school; however, the biomedical and individualistic models used have generated widespread criticism, as figures remain the same. In the context of failed interventions on increasing levels of physical activity, this study utilizes a socioecological model to analyze and understand how physical inactivity is reproduced in girls in the Chilean education system. A qualitative study was implemented, as it allows a focus on the entailed meanings, context, and processes. Active semi-structured interviews were conducted with 40 groups comprising headmasters, teachers, non-teachers, students, and families. The results show that physical inactivity is linked to factors that go beyond the individualistic model; that is, consideration must include intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, community, and public policy dimensions. Furthermore, gender stereotypes gain relevance in physical education classes, in addition to friendships and family, teaching, and administrative work, access to safe play areas, use of spaces, and widespread cultural factors associated with men and women. This study concludes that the assessed gender differences should be approached from a pedagogical perspective beyond common sense, further reporting that the individualized explanation for physical inactivity is irrelevant to answer why women are more inactive than men.

COVID-19 and Dispositions of the Chilean Healthcare System: Sociomedical Networks in Care Decisions of Chronic Illnesses.

This article is an empirical work on decision-making processes in the case of persons with chronic illnesses in the COVID19 pandemic context, regarding their medical care and self-care. Medical decisions are processes that guide the production of a health diagnosis or treatment, using the available information, where the patients' preferences are often incorporated. This article tackles the impact of the pandemic on chronically ill patients' medical decisions when the care system has been significantly altered by it. Considering that health decisions are importantly embedded in social and economic conditions, the pandemic affects a precarious care system and constrains individual possibilities. Chile has a weak support infrastructure for caregivers and a health care system that promotes private health and a low-quality public health system. Hence, the pandemic is an adverse context for chronically ill patients and it alters the conditions in which medical decisions are taken. We performed 10 interviews with chronically ill patients who took responsibility for their own health decisions: five patients diagnosed with common chronic diseases and five patients diagnosed with rare chronic diseases. After Reflexive Thematic Analysis, the results show that the Chilean health system is extremely precarious and that not many alternatives are or have been offered to chronically ill patients in the COVID19 context.