Associated organisationsBirkbeck, University of London · University of ExeterEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£1.3M
PeriodSept 2017 — Sept 2022
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
A GP sits with a patient in silence, not because treatment has stopped, but because waiting is part of the care itself. This project rethinks the relationship between time and healthcare by examining waiting not as a failure of efficiency, but as a meaningful cultural and psychosocial experience. It addresses a gap in how we understand the temporalities of care—from the history of delayed time since 1860 to modern practices like “watchful waiting” in general practice, psychotherapy, and end-of-life care. If successful, the research could reframe public and policy debates about NHS waiting lists, moving beyond the urgent drive to reduce waiting times toward a more nuanced understanding of how waiting can function as a form of careful attention. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven work in the medical humanities and psychosocial studies. It does not promise shorter queues, but it may change how we think about the time we spend waiting for care—and what that time might mean.
View original technical description
This project brings together an interdisciplinary team to investigate waiting as a cultural and psychosocial concept, and an embodied and historical experience, in order to understand the temporalities of healthcare. It represents a fundamental rethinking of the relation between time and care through a critical analysis of waiting in the modern period. Working across Medical Humanities and Psychosocial Studies, we will uncover the history, cultural representation, and psychosocial organisation of delayed and impeded time, from 1860 to the present. This work will underpin focused investigations of ‘watchful waiting’ in current general practice, psychotherapy, and end of life care. We ask which models of time operate within healthcare practices and develop new models of durational temporality to conceptualise how waiting can operate as a form of careful attention, historically and in the present. Contextualising these healthcare practices within broader social organisations of time, we open up the meanings, potentialities, and difficulties of waiting in current times. Through academic publications and extensive public engagement, we will reframe debates about waiting in and for healthcare, moving beyond the urgent need to reduce waiting times in the NHS, towards a more comprehensive understanding of the relation between waiting, care, and changing experiences of time.
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