Sarah Balcom

"The Social Organization of Nurses Working Together: An Institutional Ethnography"

• Date: January 22, 2018
• Time: 11:00 a.m.
• Location: UNB SJ, Philip W Oland Hall, Room 202.

Abstract

Registered and practical nurses’ work closely together to provide care to patients in many different healthcare settings. There is, however, little published research about the actual ‘collaborative’ work that exists between these two groups of differently credentialed nurses’. For my doctoral research, I will use institutional ethnography to explore registered and practical nurses’ actual experiences with ‘collaborative’ work. Institutional ethnography, a research approach developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith, allows researchers to explore the social relations that organize people’s everyday lives and uncover the hidden practices and activities that large social institutions, like health authorities and professional organizations, generate in their ‘ruling.’ I will collect data through participant observations and interviews, and conduct textual analysis to explicate how the work nurses’ do together to provide care is socially organized.

Central to my research is the understanding that institutions govern the daily lives of registered and practical nurses’ through texts, like job descriptions and ‘scopes of practice’ documents. These texts, often created with managerial, or business-oriented, goals in mind, may or may not be in conflict with registered and practical nurses’ own goals for their patients’ care. This research will provide a critical summary of the ‘collaborative’ work that currently exist between registered and practical nurses’; and will map how institutions organize this work and registered and practical nurses’ respective roles in their patients’ care.