Waiting for health care: Some theoretical and methodological considerations for exploring the phenomenon of waiting


Katelin Albert, University of Victoria; Vera Caine, University of Victoria

We all wait throughout our lives, although mostly ordinarily. However, waiting for health care is extraordinary, yet also expected and normalized in health care (Fogarty and Cronin, 2008). Exceptionally long medical wait times are defining characteristics of Canada’s health care system (Kelly, 2022). The median wait time in Canada for medical treatment is 27.4 weeks. This is the longest it has ever been in Canada; it ranges from around 51 days to 271 days, depending on the province and the care required (Moir and Barua, 2022). When people seek care, they wait: for appointments, diagnosis, specialist care, results, surgery, and answers. As a social phenomenon, waiting is not neutral – it shapes the lives of those accessing care, is imbued with power, inequality, structural violence (Anderson, 2014), and is filled with expectations and responsibilities that are gendered, normative, and cultural (Dewart et al., 2021). It is also relational, with other people and institutions, shaping the social organization of many aspects and domains of life. When people wait, they are in a complicated state of stasis, suspension, but also active waiting. Those waiting may imagine future possibilities, consider who and what they are waiting for, and are living in precarity where their lives are marked by suspension (Llewellyn and Higgs, 2021). Despite the centrality of waiting in health care, it is an underexplored aspect of research (Dewart et al., 2021). In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of waiting for health care. Bringing together diverse interdisciplinary literatures on waiting and insights from our own research, we i) provide an overview of what we know about experiences of waiting for health care, and ii) offer our thoughts on some theoretical and methodological considerations for future research in this area.

This paper will be presented at the following session: