Because of their shared backgrounds, community health workers' (CHWs) care of patients/program participants (PAPAs) is assumed to be acceptable, and often not evaluated empirically. Using PRISMA guidelines, we reviewed 9560 articles from 5 databases, selected 37 articles for full-text review, and developed a 5-dimensional depth analysis (focus, context, meaning, range, and voices) to characterize quality/quantity of PAPA feedback. Depth analyses clarified a spectrum of PAPA responses from extremely positive to ambivalence to outright distrust and frustration with perceived CHW limitations.
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December 2015
Mexican midwives have long taken part in a broader Latin American trend to promote "humanized birth" as an alternative to medicalized interventions in hospital obstetrics. As midwives begin to regain authority in reproductive health and work within hospital units, they come to see the issue not as one of mere medicalization but of violence and violation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with midwives from across Mexico during a time of widespread social violence, my research examines an emergent critique of hospital birth as a site of what is being called violencia obstétrica (obstetric violence).
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