Minding the Gaps in Fish Welfare: The Untapped Potential of Fish Farm Workers.

The welfare of farmed fish is often regarded with less concern than the welfare of other husbandry animals, as fish are not universally classified as sentient beings. In Norway, farmed fish and other husbandry animals are legally protected under the same laws. Additionally, the legislature has defined a number of aquaculture-specific amendments, including mandatory welfare courses for fish farmers who have a key role in securing animal welfare, also with regards to noting welfare challenges in the production process. This article uses fish welfare courses as a site from which to inquire about the common-sense understanding of fish welfare in Norwegian fish farming. The focus is specifically on fish farm employees, their experiences of welfare-related issues and contradictions in their daily work, and the struggle to act responsibly in aquaculture settings. Through participant observation at welfare courses, as well as interviews and conversations with fish farm workers, the article details how challenges are experienced 'on the ground', and suggests how fish farm workers' own experiential knowledge might be mobilized to improve the general welfare of farmed fish.

Health worker style and trustworthiness as perceived by Pakistani-born persons with type 2 diabetes in Oslo, Norway.

This article explores Pakistani-born persons' expectations regarding health encounters and health-worker style, and consequences for communication. It is part of a larger qualitative study involving both health workers and Pakistani-born persons in Oslo. An earlier publication based on interviews with health workers revealed dilemmas around role enactment, and described how they perceived Pakistani-born patients to expect an authoritarian health-worker style. The present article is based on interviews with patients and reveals that Pakistani-born diabetics expect empathy and care rather than an authoritarian style. The interviews indicate that lack of trust and diverging role expectations may be understood in the context of class and level of education, as well as ethnicity. Responding to theories about empowerment work and the dual impact of ethnicity and class, the study indicates that health workers should admit their professional expert role, and combine this role with a caring attitude in order to build trust.

Role dilemmas among health-workers in cross-cultural patient encounters around dietary advice.

AIM: The aim of this paper is to explore Norwegian health workers' experiences from cross-cultural patient encounters, and how they understand and enact their role when meeting patients with Pakistani background to whom they give dietary advice related to type 2 diabetes. METHODS: Qualitative in-depth interviews have been performed with six hospital dietitians and six general practitioners in Oslo. RESULTS: The health workers consider themselves to be patient-centred and stress the importance of the two dimensions, empathy and equality. However, they often experience that patients want them to be more authoritarian, a way of acting that would be totally in disagreement with their convictions, although some occasionally do adopt an authoritarian style. More striking is that some health workers' moral engagement to involve and empower patients actually leads them to be authoritarian. For others, a fear of insulting the patient results in their advice being too diffuse. CONCLUSIONS: A possible explanation for such ways of responding to the patient may be that the health workers, in their articulation of patient-centredness, draw on a repertoire of social conduct that involves an effort to level out, or tacitly deny, hierarchic structures, and that this becomes more pronounced in cross-cultural encounters. Patient-centredness and empowerment are results of long ongoing processes in Western countries, based on ideals of equality and individual freedom. The results from this study indicate that these approaches may pose intricate dilemmas for the health workers in their cross-cultural encounters, and need further attention.

Experience of dietary advice among Pakistani-born persons with type 2 diabetes in Oslo.

Experience and implementation of dietary advice are influenced by various factors including ethnic, cultural and religious background. The aim is to explore how ethnic minority persons with diabetes experience dietary advice given by Norwegian health-workers, which strategies they have in response to the advice and how they explain their actions. In-depth interviews were performed with 15 Pakistani-born persons with type 2 diabetes living in Oslo. The analyses are based on the principles of Giorgi's interpretation of phenomenology. The participants expressed great concern to follow the advice. However, narratives about constraints were numerous. These concerned different life-situational factors, but more importantly they were related to communication problems arising from discontinuities between universalising medical knowledge and lay knowledge, as well as between different types of culturally defined lay knowledge. As a consequence, advice was generally experienced as inadequately based on the participant's food-cultural background, leaving the person with diabetes to do the translation between different levels of knowledge. In general health-workers would benefit from expanding their knowledge of the many positive aspects of their patients' cultural background, and apply their knowledge thereafter, whether it concerns (food)-culture or the impact of religion in everyday life.