Haunted Care: Engaging Health Hauntology to Understand Health Citizenship in Evolving Welfare States

Abstract

This paper applies a hauntological framework to explore how health citizenship in the UK is shaped by the spectral presence of neoliberal policies, particularly through increased use of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS). The NHS is considered a keystone of national identity in the UK on account of its core socialist and humanitarian principles. However, decades of neoliberal policies, and particularly the growing implementation of PPPs, have created increased dissonance between the NHS as ideation and the NHS as a material, place-based health service. I explore how these changes manifest in my father's experiences of a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), considering the spectral significance of the systemic relationships, care pathways, collective imaginaries, and vital functions that are folded into this object, and by extension my father's health citizenship. Assembling hauntological concepts and healthcare experiences, I explore how the CGM mediates between life, care, and industry to illuminate evolving forms of health citizenship in contemporary welfare health systems.