Speaker Series – One for Each Trouble: Establishing and Navigating Private Clinics in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

 About the speaker: Mari Valdur

Mari Valdur is a PhD student of social anthropology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is based in Ulaanbaatar for her PhD fieldwork until fall 2018. This is her fifth visit since early 2012 now amounting to year and a half working and carrying out research in Mongolia. Her current interests cover reproductive healthcare in Ulaanbaatar, both issues of availability, access and (in)formality as well as broader themes of spatial relations in and beyond the city, gender and personhood.

Abstract:

Since becoming a democratic state, Mongolia has gone through significant healthcare reforms that have resulted in the rise of a large and often confusing private sector. This presentation will review the recent history of a rising market economy and its impact on medical healthcare in Mongolia, with a particular focus on Ulaanbaatar.

In a situation where doctors’ salaries are below the national average, establishing private practices, or related businesses, has become one way for doctors to cope with the situation. For the patients (clients), the system, in many cases, remains unknown and unpredictable in the course of seeking assistance.

Although access to healthcare has become an extremely different experience, depending on the ability to pay, there are still services that overwhelmingly belong to the state, such as childbirth. This presentation will discuss social anthropology and medical anthropology and how these disciplines could approach and contribute to the understanding of the situation and provide some examples beyond Mongolia. Guests from both academic and non-academic backgrounds are warmly invited to participate.

About:

The American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS) is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting scholarship in Mongolian Studies. The ACMS Speaker Series are organized in partnership with the U.S. Embassy and the Natsagdorj Library and provides an important platform for researchers engaged in Mongolia to share their experiences and findings with the public. The event promotes information exchange on a variety of subjects related to Mongolia text and is free and open to the public.

Co-Sponsored by the American Cultural and Information Center, Ulaanbaatar