Blurred logics behind frontline staff decision-making for cancer control in Argentina

ABSTRACT

In this article we approach socioeconomic inequities in cancer by examining a particular dimension of health care: how health services attending patients with cancer set priorities for their daily activities. By using qualitative ethnographic data, we explore logics underlying how practitioners make priority-setting decisions regarding cancer prevention and care. We found four main types of accounts: accounts based on macro social inequalities, accounts based on patients’ social and cultural features, accounts based on characteristics of health services, and accounts based on personal voluntarism. These blurred logics shape the everyday decisions which have an impact not only on the quality of health care in general but on the increasing socioeconomic inequities in cancer care attention.

KEYWORDS:

• Cancer
• Latin America
• priority setting
• decision making
• frontline practitioners
• inequity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.