About Waiting Times

Waiting Times is a Wellcome-funded research project investigating the relation between waiting and healthcare. It proposes that whilst health services must attempt to reduce unnecessary waiting, they must also take care to preserve the waiting that is at the core of healthcare itself.  This is the waiting time needed for symptoms to become understandable and coalesce into a diagnosis, for test results to offer vital information, or for treatments to take hold. It includes the waiting that frames living with disability and chronic illness, and the endurance of the temporal loops of recovery, relapse, remission and dying. Approached from the perspective that care is a temporal and relational practice, the project investigates healthcare practices that not only take time, but also make time: end of life care; the ‘watchful waiting’ of chronic and repeat attendance in general practice; adolescent mental health care with young people at risk of suicide; care of gender questioning young people who may need to stop and restart time in their own ways. Waiting Times understands that experiences of time are not static but are socially and politically produced, and are lived at different and complex tempos. It contextualizes waiting as a peculiarly ‘modern’ experience, posing questions about how experiences of time have changed over the last 150 years, and using these insights to examine what it means to wait in and for healthcare. Using engaged research methods with patients and healthcare practitioners who experience waiting in the current National Health System, as well as historical, literary, and psychosocial approaches, Waiting Times elucidates both the difficulties and the vital significance of waiting for practices of care.

Collection Advisors

Laura Salisbury is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature and works in the Department of Creative Writing and the Wellcome Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She has published widely in modern literature, particularly on the work of Samuel Beckett, and in the medical humanities. Her books include Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (2012) and Neurology and Modernity (2010). She is currently writing a cultural history of waiting in post-war Britain called Between-Time Stories: British States of Waiting. With Lisa Baraitser, she is co-Principal Investigator of Waiting Times.

Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) and Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017) and has written widely on motherhood, psychoanalytic feminist theory, care and time. She is currently writing a monograph on the relation between care and violence in the wake of the global pandemic called Watching Waitfully: Care and Violence in post-pandemic times. With Laura Salisbury, she is co-Principal Investigator of Waiting Times.