Mothers: The Invisible Instruments of Health Promotion

In this article, I focus on two problematic aspects of British health-promotion campaigns regarding feeding children, particularly regarding breastfeeding and obesity. The first of these is that health-promotion campaigns around “lifestyle” issues dehumanize mothers with their imagery or text, stemming from the ongoing undervaluing and objectification of mothers and women. Public health-promotion instrumentalizes mothers as necessary components in achieving its aims, while at the same time undermining their agency as persons and interlocutors by tying “mother” to particular images. This has a double effect: first, it excludes mothers who do not fit the campaign picture of a mother; second, it encloses those who do (even vaguely) fit the picture into an objectified image of motherhood that is defined by and subject to the dominant white, heteropatriarchal gaze. The second problem is that campaigns place unjustified demands on mothers, which stem from a misinterpretation of the maternal duty to benefit. I argue that nutrition-related health concerns regarding children are improperly framed as individual failures of maternal duty, rather than as failures of a system to function correctly. These arguments ultimately support shifting the focus of responsibility for issues around childhood nutrition away from mothers and back toward policymakers.

The Influence of Non-Prescriptive Legislation in the Evolution of Offshore Well Integrity Practices: An Exploratory Review

Among the stochastic tools and risk analysis techniques, ALARP (As Low As Reasonably Practicable) concept has proved to be the most influential guidance regarding the development of regulations and standards of the offshore industry in terms of risk assessment and consequently of equipment integrity. The reasons for that can be traced back to early seventies, when the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE) released its seminal document “The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974”. The 1974 Act was the first regulation to adopt a non-prescriptive approach as a basis to configure the ruling legislation of industrial activities. Since then, risk analysis methods have encountered a vast field of opportunities in the wide range of options proportionated by such framework. In this sense, the Safety Case and the NORSOK standards play a significant role in the non-prescriptive approach application in the offshore industry. The present work discusses the influence of these two frameworks in the definition of the current Brazilian offshore legislation, especially in terms of the design, tests, and monitoring of the so called Solidary Well Barriers throughout the well life cycle. The United States legislation, largely reviewed after the Macondo accident, will be used to counterpoint the prescriptive and non-prescriptive approaches.

The Principle of Restraint: Public Reason and the Reform of Public Administration

Normative political theorists have been growing more and more aware of the many difficult questions raised by the discretionary power inevitably left to public administrators. This article aims to advance a novel normative principle, called ‘principle of restraint’, regulating reform of established administrative agencies. I argue that the ability of public administrators to exercise their power in accordance with the requirements of public reason is protected by an attitude of restraint on the part of potential reformers. Specifically, they should refrain from any reform of an administrative agency that involves a switch to a considerably more loosely interconnected system of values underlying the work of that agency. To illustrate the importance of the principle of restraint, I examine a case from British health policy, showing that a recent reform of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence well exemplifies the serious problems brought by any violation of that principle.

Rights of access to healthcare for undocumented migrants: understanding the Italian and British national health systems

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the levels of access to healthcare available to undocumented migrants in the Italian and British health systems through a comparative analysis of health policies for this population in these two national health systems. Design/methodology/approach It builds on textual and legal analysis to explore the different meanings that the principle of universal access to healthcare might have according to literature and legal documents in the field, especially those from the human rights domain. Then, the concept of universal access, in theory, is contrasted with actual health policies in each of the selected countries to establish its meaning in practice and according to the social context. The analysis relies on policy papers, data on health expenditure, legal statutes and administrative regulations and is informed by one research question: What background conditions better explain more universal and comprehensive health systems for undocumented migrants? Findings By answering this research question the paper concludes that the Italian health system is more comprehensive than the British health system insofar it guarantees access free of charge to different levels of care, including primary, emergency, preventive and maternity care, while the rule in the British health system is the recovering of charges for the provision of services, with few exceptions. One possible legal explanation for the differences in access between Italy and UK is the fact that the right to health is not recognised as a fundamental constitutional right in the latter as it is in the former. Originality/value The paper contributes to ongoing debates on Universal Health Coverage and migration, and dialogues with recent discussions on social justice and welfare state typologies.