Public Lecture - Physicians’ lived experiences of law in encounters with undocumented migration: Balancing medical need, knowledge, and ethics with the law in everyday medicine
Location:
Auditorium A,
Shirley Hall (GU108) Chancellor’s Building,
College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary
Date/time
Tue 13 May 2025
11:00 - 12:15
About the event
People living as undocumented in Europe often face major barriers to healthcare, and physicians in many contexts unknowingly function as legal actors assessing and deciding on who receives care and who does not. Many physicians navigate this position unexpectedly, with limited legal knowledge on how to proceed. This public lecture presents Dr. Greenbrook's doctoral research and upcoming book, exploring physicians experiences of balancing law, ethics, and medical reasoning in encounters with undocumented migration in everyday medicine. Based on in depth interviews with 46 physicians working in public healthcare in Sweden, the study identified two common responses. Some physicians choose to ignore the law and provide care based on medical need exclusively. These practitioners often work around the system and believe they are supported by the medical community at large in doing so. Most, however, find themselves thwarted, disoriented, and powerless in these encounters. They feel restricted by the law in their actions, and are torn between their duties to their patients and their duties to society as public servents working within a public system. This leaves them feeling isolated, uncertain, and resigned surrounding how they proceed in these encounters. Many choose to deliver care either way, however, whether this is done with perceived authorty or in the shadow of legal consequences differs greatly. Ultimately, in encounters with undocumented patients, doctors feel caught between legal rules and human needs—an experience that affects them deeply, both professionally and personally.
About the speaker
Josephine T. V. Greenbrook is a medicolegal scholar and a clinician dedicated to interweaving migration medicine, critical legal studies and anthropological theory at the nexus between medicine, law, and migration. She is currently a research fellow in medical law and deputy director of the Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Sciences and the Law at Edinburgh Law School, and a researcher in migration medicine and global health at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Gothenburg’s Institute of Medicine in Sweden. She is also co-chair of Borders in Health, Medicine, and Society, an international interdisciplinary research platform, and principle investigator of the The Boundaries Longitudinal Study, funded by the Swedish Research Council, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, the Centre on Global Migration, the Institute of Medicine, and the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, and the Centre for Sami Studies at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway. She explores medicine, the social sciences, and the law, navigating the liminal spaces between these fields, with a specific focus on highlighting humanity, the socio-legal, and the socio-cultural (in all its complexity) in medical structures, medical identities, and the everyday medical encounter.
After the public lecture, a lunch workshop will be held from 12:30pm - 2:00pm with invited physicians, legal scholars, and migration researchers, aiming to identify knowledge gaps for further research surrounding physicians’ encounters with undocumented migration within the NHS.
If you are a physician or medical student who would like to participate in this workshop, please contact destiny.noble@ed.ac.uk at your earliest convenience to reserve your spot. Places are limited.
Image credit: Freepik