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Healthcare platform companies, healthcare professionals’ labor agency, and the restructuring geography of the Swedish public healthcare

My dissertation project focuses on the rise of platform companies entering the Swedish public primary care from 2016 onwards by providing consultations with healthcare professionals via apps. Via app-based consultations patients can consult a doctor, nurse or psychologist on-demand from almost anywhere and anytime, whereas consultations in the conventional primary care typically meant booking an appointment with a healthcare professional at a local primary care center during offices hours.

While initially online and with medical doctors, healthcare platform companies nowadays often provide integrated services, both via apps and in-place, and with various categories of healthcare professionals. Healthcare’s entry into the platform economy is evolving in parallel with restructuring of the healthcare system towards more marketization and public-private partnerships. The expansion of healthcare platform companies also entails possibilities for healthcare professionals to engage with platform work. 

The project aims to shed light on the conditions underlying the emergence of platform companies in the public healthcare, to investigate healthcare professionals’ engagement with platform work from their own perspective, and to explore what these developments might mean for the changing geography of healthcare in Sweden. 

An empirical sub-study of this project seeks to understand why and how healthcare professionals work for healthcare platform companies. Based on analyzing interviews with healthcare professionals, this sub-study intends to foreground the motivations and practices that underpin healthcare professionals’ engagement with such platform work, and via which they shape the geography of healthcare. 

My conference papers:

• van Eerbeek, P. (2024). Restructuring at a distance: Healthcare platform companies and commodification and financialization of the Swedish public primary care. Nordic Geographers Meeting, Copenhagen, Denmark. June 24-27, 2024
• van Eerbeek, P. & Hedberg, C. (2022). Translocal migrant brokers in the Thai-Swedish wild berry industry: Moral economies and labor intermediaries. International Labour Process Conference, Padua, Italy.  April 21-23, 2022
• van Eerbeek, P. (2021). Contentious landscapes of platform work in public healthcare: Online doctors in Sweden. II Digital Geographies, October 28-29. Virtual conference.
• van Eerbeek, P. (2021). Reconfigurations of work and changing public sector geographies: The rise of digital primary healthcare. The American Association of Geographers' (AAG), Annual Meeting, April 7-11. Virtual conference