Providing culturally competent and universal health care in the Peruvian Amazon: The role of medical authority

Peru's Ministry of Health promotes the provision of culturally competent and universal health care. To do so they have implemented policies aimed at addressing indigenous peoples' social, geographic, and financial barriers to health care as well as cultural gaps between them and (bio)medical providers. While scholars argued that these policies have fallen short, their explanations have ignored the role that medical providers' professional authority plays in implementing these policies. This study examined how medical providers aim to provide culturally competent care and facilitate patients' use of medical services while protecting their professional authority. This includes preserving control over their space of work and their capacity to legitimately diagnose, treat, and prognosticate medical problems. Ethnographic observations and 50 interviews conducted between May 2017 and February 2018 show that to facilitate the provision of culturally competent and universal health care, medical providers engaged in non-clinical tasks, trespassed bureaucratic rules, tolerated and integrated the use of traditional medicine, and expanded the time and place of their practice. To advance these strategies, medical providers sacrificed aspects of their social authority (e.g., their autonomy over their work) and their cultural authority (e.g., their ability to define treatment). However, providers also asserted aspects of their professional authority such as the ability to give patients instructions and advice and control over the use of traditional medicine. The latter had the potential of deterring some women from having institutional births, thus reproducing some of the constraints that indigenous people face in accessing health care.