An Exploratory Qualitative Analysis of Explanations for COVID-19-Related Racial Disparities Among St. Louis Residents: "I Don't Really Pay Attention to the Racial Stuff Very Much".

Introduction: Public health explanations for the disproportionate share of COVID-19-related illness and death among the Black population often differ from lay explanations, which can affect the public's support for policies that address these disparities. This qualitative exploratory study examined the explanatory frameworks for COVID-19-related racial disparities in St. Louis among 54 St.

Trusted sources for COVID-19 testing and vaccination: lessons for future health communication.

Background: Promoting COVID-19 vaccination (both the primary series and boosters) remains a priority among healthcare professionals and requires understanding the various sources people trust for acquiring COVID-19 information.

Method: From October 2021 to May 2022, we interviewed 150 people who called 2-1-1 helplines in Connecticut and North Carolina about their COVID-19 testing and vaccination experiences in order to (1) better understand where people obtain trusted COVID-19 health information and (2) identify how public health professionals can share emergency health information in the future. We used a mixed methods approach in which semi-structured qualitative interviews and survey data were collected in parallel and analyzed separately.

Cultivating the ideal obstetrical patient: How physicians-in-training describe pain associated with childbirth.

We explore the work labor pain does in cultivating obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) resident physicians' conceptualization of the "ideal" obstetrical patient - replete with moral, pharmacological, classed, and racialized dimensions. Our data is derived from a single-site, qualitative study conducted at an urban academic OB/GYN residency program in the midwestern U.S.

Questioning Biomedicine's Privileging of Disease and Measurability.

Within biomedicine, the diagnosis of disease is often privileged over a patient's experience of illness. Yet up to 30% of primary care visits might be attributable to persistent illness without a diagnosed disease, including functional somatic syndromes like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. When clinicians are unable to diagnose disease or correlate symptoms with measurable changes in biomarkers, patients experiencing such an illness are at increased risk for suspicion, misplaced questioning, or having their motives misinterpreted through damaging social and cultural narratives about gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or disability.

Mitigating ethical conflict and moral distress in the care of patients on ECMO: impact of an automatic ethics consultation protocol.

Aims: This study evaluates a protocol for early, routine ethics consultation (EC) for patients on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to support decision-making in the context of clinical uncertainty with the aim of mitigating ethical conflict and moral distress.

Methods: We conducted a single-site qualitative analysis of EC documentation for all patients receiving ECMO support from 15 August 2018 to 15 May 2019 (n=68). Detailed analysis of 20 ethically complex cases with protracted ethics involvement identifies four key ethical domains: limits of prognostication, bridge to nowhere, burden of treatment and system-level concerns.