Living with pelvic organ prolapseA culture-centred communications exploration of becoming healthy in the Amhara region of Ethiopia

While pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is acknowledged as a significant health issue in the Amhara region, existing literature fails to capture the complex communicative processes that shape how women experience their condition. This study fills this gap by applying a holistic, decolonial and culture-centred approach to communication emphasizing how personal, cultural, and structural factors influence communication practices around women with POP.

Preliminary fieldwork with 15 healthcare providers informed the research design of this study in 2019. The empirical foundation of this qualitative study consists of 20 interviews with women with POP, three focus group discussions with each three women with POP, six interviews with family members and six follow-up discussions with women with POP in 2022.

This research uncovers how communication practices around this sensitive health issue play out on multiple levels. At a structural level, this study reveals the obstacles women face when seeking specialised care, including economic constraints, infrastructural limitations, and a scarcity of information about treatment options and communication strategies used to overcome those.

In studying women’s communicative ecologies, this study finds that cultural values centred on communal care and social support enable women to access healthcare despite these structural constraints. In lifting women’s experiences of communicating with healthcare providers and institutions, this research reveals how Eurocentric biomedical practices clash with culture-centred practices in medical communicative spaces.

Recognising the various ways in which stigma and societal taboos impact women's communicative experiences with POP, this study presents a nuanced account of the many shades of silence emerging around their condition. It scrutinises how localised expressions of coloniality divide people into “illiterate-rural”, and thus unworthy of expressing their needs and “literate-urban” and entitled to teach the illiterate.

Amplifying women’s experiences, this study sets the stage for future research and interventions to support subaltern groups experiencing sensitive health issues.