Accounting for access to healthcare: Analyzing interview talk of hard-to-reach regions’ residents and mobile medical units’ professionals in Greece

TL;DR

This study examines how people in remote Greek regions and healthcare professionals explain barriers to healthcare access, revealing differing perspectives on structural versus personal factors.

Contribution

The study introduces a discursive analysis of how psychosocial barriers to healthcare are rhetorically constructed and accounted for in social interactions.

Findings

Residents attributed healthcare reluctance to structural barriers, while professionals emphasized psychological explanations.

Remote living was discursively framed as both a 'cure' and a 'curse' for health outcomes.

The study shows how health inequalities are enacted and reproduced through social interactions.

Abstract

This study explores how social actors account for psychosocial barriers to healthcare access. Interviews with 17 residents in remote regions of Greece and 12 professionals employed by Mobile Medical Units were analyzed using the tools and concepts of critical discursive social psychology. Analysis indicated that, oriented to different accountability concerns, residents tended to attribute reluctance to seek medical help to structural barriers, while professionals leaned toward psychological and individual-centered explanations. Findings also highlighted the construction of living in hard-to-reach areas as both a “cure” and a “curse” for residents’ capacity to achieve a healthy status, representing remote communities as both enhancing solidarity and social support and as promoting stigmatization against illness and social isolation. Building upon prior discourse-oriented approaches in health psychology, the study seeks to exemplify how a discursive and rhetorically oriented research agenda can be employed to explore how health inequalities are enacted and (re)produced in social interactions.

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