Negotiating Professional and Social Voices: Gendered, racialised and professional connection and differentiation in primary care organisations

[First Paragraphs] The project discussed in this paper is a qualitative interview based study which explores the subjective gendered and racialised professional identifications of health and social care professionals1. Participants for the project were drawn from recently formed Primary Care Trusts.

There is increasingly wide recognition that institutional racism and sexism occur within health and social care, with a number of policy responses which attempt to counteract these tendencies (NHSE, 2000; NHSE, 2001). However the relationship between institutional and personal racism and sexism within health and social care is ambiguous. Charges of the ‘unwitting’ or unconscious reproduction of sexist and racist institutional norms heighten anxiety and confusion within health and social care organisations around issues of gender and ethnicity. Health and social care professionals within this context experience ‘a recurrent, and disconcertingly unpredictable, encounter with self’ where values, behaviour and professional practice are rendered visible and problematic (Husband, 1996:46). It is this ‘encounter with self’ and its implications for the development of health and social care policy that the research seeks to explore.

The research questions for the project include: • How do health and social care professionals negotiate their gendered, racialised [‘social’] and ‘professional’ identities? • How do they reconcile these potentially conflicting identifications? • What implications might this have for how they identify with a variety of different others including other professionals and other users?