Alex Haagaard urges clinicians and researchers to recognize that healthcare systems often perpetuate injustice and inequality, calling for a critical analysis of guidelines and a focus on marginalized patients.
About Alex
Alex Haagaard is a design researcher and founding member of The Disabled List, a design advocacy collective that approaches lived experience of disability as a kind of creative and technical expertise.
Transcript
David Kennedy: What is it that you want clinicians or researchers to know about people challenged with pain?
Alex Haagaard: You are fundamentally working within a system that is not designed to be just for everyone. And so the way that you work has to recognize the ways that you are working in systems that are not designed for justice, and it has to, you have to be willing to push back against the ways that injustice exists in the system. You have to be willing, for example, clinical guidelines are designed in very normative ways. So they look at, you know, very particular segments of the population sort of make assumptions, and even when they you know, when they make efforts to engage with patients, they’re not always engaging with the most marginalized and vulnerable of patients.
And so what that means in practice is that you are operating in guidelines that may not apply to your patient’s experience and may not give them what they need.
And also it needs to be approached really critically, with a recognition of again, like the power dynamics that exist in systems and the ways that injustice sort of happens in terms of what patients have access to in terms of, you know what they’re saying about their own bodies and things like that.
David Kennedy: Yeah. And I think that speaks perfectly to like the collaborative therapeutic relationship.
Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share your one thing, we really appreciate it.
Alex Haagaard: So thank you for doing this series. It’s amazing.