This is the website for our Wellcome funded project on marginalisation and healthcare in crisis, drawing on experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). You can view our former paperwork under the different projects: Sexual health care in the NHS, Bladder health, Science, policy and activism. Recruitment has ended for the sexual health care project.
This Wellcome funded project will run for up to five years from October 2019 involving researchers based at the University of Sussex. Our research explores how different groups mobilise around a healthcare challenge, and how issues of vulnerability can be addressed, including those at the intersections of immigration, homelessness and precarious work, and the experiences of ethnic, sexual and gender minorities. The study retains the focus on AMR as a serious and ongoing challenge to the provision of health care, both during and after COVID-19, but also notes that the pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of understanding how marginalisation happens in healthcare, and how this can translate into higher morbidity and mortality in some groups. As we have seen in the pandemic, these groups may be more at risk of catching and dying from COVID-19 virus. In the case of AMR some people may similarly be at a higher risk of bacterial infections in relation to sexual and bladder health. Questions about existing and intensifying health inequalities, and the capacity of different health systems and other social infrastructure are all pressing at this moment. As with COVID-19, we are keen to explore the effects of racism as well as sexism, and the effects of these social factors on access to appropriate health care and protective factors like secure and safe housing.