The Study

This study uses a research fieldwork strategy called participant observation. This involves being present on the wards to observe, listen, and interact with service users, staff, and those visiting during the everyday occurrences in the setting.

The study involves three six-month phases of fieldwork research with planned activities that participants are invited to engage with. The days, times, and locations when I will be on the ward along with any planned activities are presented on a timetable that is available on the ward.

Discovery

At the beginning of the study, I will ask different people to show me around, identifying areas that are important to them. I will also settle down in different locations to quietly make detailed notes of the everyday happenings that occur there.

No specific details about individuals are recorded without asking for permission first. Where participants would like to share their experiences, a coded case file is developed to link their contributions over the duration of the study. All participants may contribute as much or as little as they are comfortable and may withdraw from the study at any time.

More information about participating can be found by clicking here.

Activities

Every two weeks, group art elicitation workshops will be facilitated. These are supported group activities where service users and staff express what 'care' and 'the skills of care' mean through creative mediums.

Focus groups will be facilitated where the developing study findings are shared and the group feedback their perspectives, ask questions, correct my interpretations, and discuss which areas are of most importance.

Exploration

After a brief break and analysis of the information collected so far, the areas (processes, practices, and places) identified as most important from the observations made and participant's feedback will become the focus for the next six months of the study.

Visits will now focus on these selected areas strategically to build a detailed and reliable account of what happens in these instances and how it is experienced by those involved. Participants remain welcome to join and leave the study throughout this phase and can contribute as little or as much as they would like.

Activities

Group art elicitation workshops will continue to be facilitated.

The focus groups are replaced with detailed one-to-one interviews. These semi-structured interviews take two forms: one (contrast interviewing) aims to distinguish the concepts that compose the areas of interest from other aspects of ward life. The other (micro-phenomenological) aims to unpack specific lived experiences in detail.

Design

After twelve months of fieldwork, the observations, case files, and study activities will have curated a significant ethnographic (social and cultural) database of occurrences and experiences.

This database will be synthesised into a 'cultural index' and analysed alongside the local and regional health services' metrics to compare the relationships between the local, organisational, and societal values and outcomes surrounding the personal and professional expertise and care that is both shaping and shaped by what is happening on daily basis in these settings.

In this final fieldwork phase, the findings will be presented back to the wards with an invitation for action; to celebrate and propagate what works and innovate areas that are felt to need improvement.

Activities

Participants are invited to form design teams that will be coached to leverage the social, behavioural and cultural insights from the study into meaningful change ideas. These ideas will be tested using a quality improvement approach.

Understanding what enables or prevents sustainable changes is the final area of focus of the study.