MD GIG: INDIVIDUAL MOTIVATIONS & COLLECTIVE RESPONSES TO GIG WORK AMONG MEDICAL DOCTORS

MD GIG examines the transition to digital service provision in the public services by exploring the rise of the ‘online doctor’ that provide consultations between doctor-patient via app-based mobile phone technology.

The aim is to explore digitalization of healthcare from a worker perspective to highlight the preconditions that give rise to gig work in the healthcare sector and explore the potential consequences at different scales.

Whereas before patients had go to a primary care center on appointment during office hours, today patients can have a consult with a doctor on-demand at any time and from anywhere.

Medical work’s entry in the platform economy, where work is reshaped into “gigs” that workers perform where and when they want, is developing parallel to organizational and economic restructuring of the healthcare system towards more marketization and private-public partnerships.

The project sets out to understand the individual motivations for doctors to take up work in digital doctor platforms through in-depth interviews to produce narratives based in the MDs own experiences, to explore the approach of the trade unions and medical associations to digital doctor platforms through expert-interviews with high level union employees to document their hopes, fears and strategies regarding changing labour markets and working conditions, and to analyse the role of digital doctor platforms in public healthcare restructuring to produce a political economy of digital healthcare.