IHPO/HOPE seminar: Suzanne Grant: Using video-reflexive ethnography to examine the hidden dimensions of inter-professional safety work in an acute medical unit
| Dates: | 20 January 2020 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Alliance Manchester Business School |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers |
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Please join us at the IHPO and HOPE joint seminar on Monday, 20th January 2020 2-3pm, Williamson Building 5th floor, seminar room 1 (5.14- directions attached)
Speaker:
Dr Suzanne Grant
University of Dundee
Lecturer in Medical Anthropology
on topic “Using video-reflexive ethnography to examine the hidden dimensions of inter-professional safety work in an acute medical unit”.
Seminar is free to attend and no registration is required.
Abstract
Almost all emergency medical admissions in the UK are now initially managed via specialist wards known as acute medical units (AMUs). The AMU is a busy, short-stay environment oriented towards rapid assessment, where patients are usually either sent home or moved to a speciality ward within 24-48 hours. As such, it is a site of significant risk due to the high throughput of very sick patients and staffing by multidisciplinary teams working multiple shifts. Dominant approaches to improving patient safety usually employ a ‘measure-and-manage’ approach to identify and manage risk, but this approach is less suitable when care is very complex and overlooks the fact that most risk does not cause harm because clinicians work together to continually mitigate these risks. Newer approaches to examining safety have therefore focused on the hidden and tacit dimensions of inter-professional work, and the adjustments and trade-offs made by professionals when balancing safety with the need to deal with very high workloads. The aim of this presentation is to examine the inter-professional ‘safety work’ (Strauss 1985) undertaken by AMU team members using video-reflexive ethnography (VRE). VRE is a collaborative methodology that combines ethnographic methods with negotiated video filming of clinical practice (‘video ethnography’). Selected video footage is then shared with participants during video reflexive sessions to stimulate collaborative analysis and reflection (‘video reflexivity’). The primary aim of this process is to reflexively engage with clinical team members on how they work together in order to make care safer. Drawing on video reflexive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an AMU with a high turnover of patients (~15,000/year) and over 200 staff members that change daily, this presentation examines the hidden and tacit aspects of inter-professional safety work in the AMU, the key formal and informal contexts where this takes place, and the value of VRE for understanding and improving inter-professional collaboration in the AMU setting and beyond.
Bio
Suzanne Grant is a lecturer in Medical Anthropology at University of Dundee. Suzanne studied Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews (MA First Class Honours (1999) and PhD (2006)) and an MSc in Public Health Research at the University of Edinburgh in 2010. Suzanne is a medical anthropologist and her research is located at the interface between anthropology, medicine and healthcare safety and quality. The overarching aim of her work is to improve understandings of safety, risk, wellbeing and dignity within and across healthcare organisational contexts through research that is both methodologically innovative and theoretically engaged. Drawing on insights from social and medical anthropology and sociology, her research adopts a novel approach to understanding and improving healthcare safety and quality through the application of innovative ethnographic and video reflexive ethnographic (VRE) methods. Her research focusses on the co-creation of safety, wellbeing and dignity by professionals, patients and their families across different healthcare organisational contexts, and the development of ethnography and VRE as research and improvement methodologies. Suzanne’s full research profile and publications are available: https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/persons/suzanne-grant
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
seminar room 1
Williamson Building
Manchester
