Navigating multipositionality in ‘insider’ ethnography

In this article, I reflect on my experience of conducting ‘insider’ ethnography in a multidisciplinary collaborative project that evaluates HIV treatment as prevention in Swaziland. Having worked as the project’s social science coordinator for over five years, I discuss balancing my role as an insider on the study team with studying the project as the object of my doctoral research. Drawing on field notes taken during the design and implementation of the project, I discuss how my proximity to the study team created certain expectations in my interactions with team members and clinic staff. In some instances, I distanced myself from the study by not participating or not supporting a consensus option; my doing so engendered a sense that I was being disloyal and sometimes created frustration among my colleagues. The multipositionality that I navigated was a product of social interactions and therefore inherently relational and intersubjective. This article aims to stimulate self-reflective and methodological discussions of how anthropologists engage in global health research and what kind of knowledge and subject positions such collaborations produce

Lost in translation?

This rather unorthodox essay is a dialogue between an anthropologist and an epidemiologist, both of whom were involved with a large-scale collaborative ethnographic project exploring medical field studies, or ‘trial communities’, in western Kenya. Reflecting on their involvement with this project, the authors consider the pragmatics of what ‘collaboration’ represents in different disciplines and how it is enacted. The dialogue, which included a follow-up interview after the research was completed, highlights the expectations and tensions in such collaborative projects and offers the epidemiologist an opportunity to highlight the ideas, methods, and possibilities that he perceived as being ‘lost in translation’ between sociocultural anthropology and experimental medicine. We raise critical issues regarding the disjuncture between epidemiological and anthropological practices in research design, methods, epistemology, and collaboration, with the hopes of provoking more discussions regarding best practices in collaborative research projects.&nbsp

Structuring communication relationships for interprofessional teamwork (SCRIPT): a cluster randomized controlled trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Despite a burgeoning interest in using interprofessional approaches to promote effective collaboration in health care, systematic reviews find scant evidence of benefit. This protocol describes the first cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) to design and evaluate an intervention intended to improve interprofessional collaborative communication and patient-centred care.</p> <p>Objectives</p> <p>The objective is to evaluate the effects of a four-component, hospital-based staff communication protocol designed to promote collaborative communication between healthcare professionals and enhance patient-centred care.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The study is a multi-centre mixed-methods cluster randomized controlled trial involving twenty clinical teaching teams (CTTs) in general internal medicine (GIM) divisions of five Toronto tertiary-care hospitals. CTTs will be randomly assigned either to receive an intervention designed to improve interprofessional collaborative communication, or to continue usual communication practices.</p> <p>Non-participant naturalistic observation, shadowing, and semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted to explore existing patterns of interprofessional collaboration in the CTTs, and to support intervention development. Interviews and shadowing will continue during intervention delivery in order to document interactions between the intervention settings and adopters, and changes in interprofessional communication.</p> <p>The primary outcome is the rate of unplanned hospital readmission. Secondary outcomes are length of stay (LOS); adherence to evidence-based prescription drug therapy; patients' satisfaction with care; self-report surveys of CTT staff perceptions of interprofessional collaboration; and frequency of calls to paging devices. Outcomes will be compared on an intention-to-treat basis using adjustment methods appropriate for data from a cluster randomized design.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Pre-intervention qualitative analysis revealed that a substantial amount of interprofessional interaction lacks key core elements of collaborative communication such as self-introduction, description of professional role, and solicitation of other professional perspectives. Incorporating these findings, a four-component intervention was designed with a goal of creating a culture of communication in which the fundamentals of collaboration become a routine part of interprofessional interactions during unstructured work periods on GIM wards.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>Registered with National Institutes of Health as NCT00466297.</p

THERACOM: a systematic review of the evidence base for interventions to improve Therapeutic Communications between black and minority ethnic populations and staff in specialist mental health services.

PMCID: PMC3599664This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.BACKGROUND: Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups in receipt of specialist mental health care have reported higher rates of detention under the mental health act, less use of psychological therapies, and more dissatisfaction. Although many explanations have been put forward to explain this, a failure of therapeutic communications may explain poorer satisfaction, disengagement from services and ethnic variations in access to less coercive care. Interventions that improve therapeutic communications may offer new approaches to tackle ethnic inequalities in experiences and outcomes. METHODS: The THERACOM project is an HTA-funded evidence synthesis review of interventions to improve therapeutic communications between black and minority ethnic patients in contact with specialist mental health services and staff providing those services. This article sets out the protocol methods for a necessarily broad review topic, including appropriate search strategies, dilemmas for classifying different types of therapeutic communications and expectations of the types of interventions to improve them. The review methods will accommodate unexpected types of study and interventions. The findings will be reported in 2013, including a synthesis of the quantitative and grey literature. DISCUSSION: A particular methodological challenge is to identify and rate the quality of many different study types, for example, randomised controlled trials, observational quantitative studies, qualitative studies and case studies, which comprise the full range of hierarchies of evidence. We discuss the preliminary methodological challenges and some solutions. (PROSPERO registration number: CRD42011001661)

Workflow in Clinical Trial Sites & Its Association with Near Miss Events for Data Quality: Ethnographic, Workflow & Systems Simulation

10.1371/journal.pone.0039671PLoS ONE76

Coping with methodological dilemmas; about establishing the effectiveness of interventions in routine medical practice

BACKGROUND: The aim of this paper is to show how researchers balance between scientific rigour and localisation in conducting pragmatic trial research. Our case is the Quattro Study, a pragmatic trial on the effectiveness of multidisciplinary patient care teams used in primary health care centres in deprived neighbourhoods of two major cities in the Netherlands for intensified secondary prevention of cardiovascular diseases. METHODS: For this study an ethnographic design was used. We observed and interviewed the researchers and the practice nurses. All gathered research documents, transcribed observations and interviews were analysed thematically. RESULTS: Conducting a pragmatic trial is a continuous balancing act between meeting methodological demands and implementing a complex intervention in routine primary health care. As an effect, the research design had to be adjusted pragmatically several times and the intervention that was meant to be tailor-made became a rather stringent procedure. CONCLUSION: A pragmatic trial research is a dynamic process that, in order to be able to assess the validity and reliability of any effects of interventions must also have a continuous process of methodological and practical reflection. Ethnographic analysis, as we show, is therefore of complementary value

Developing patient-centred care: an ethnographic study of patient perceptions and influence on quality improvement.

BACKGROUND: Understanding quality improvement from a patient perspective is important for delivering patient-centred care. Yet the ways patients define quality improvement remains unexplored with patients often excluded from improvement work. We examine how patients construct ideas of 'quality improvement' when collaborating with healthcare professionals in improvement work, and how they use these understandings when attempting to improve the quality of their local services. METHODS: We used in-depth interviews with 23 'patient participants' (patients involved in quality improvement work) and observations in several sites in London as part of a four-year ethnographic study of patient and public involvement (PPI) activities run by Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care for Northwest London. We took an iterative, thematic and discursive analytical approach. RESULTS: When patient participants tried to influence quality improvement or discussed different dimensions of quality improvement their accounts and actions frequently started with talk about improvement as dependent on collective action (e.g. multidisciplinary healthcare professionals and the public), but usually quickly shifted away from that towards a neoliberal discourse emphasising the role of individual patients. Neoliberal ideals about individual responsibility were taken up in their accounts moving them away from the idea of state and healthcare providers being held accountable for upholding patients' rights to quality care, and towards the idea of citizens needing to work on self-improvement. Participants portrayed themselves as governed by self-discipline and personal effort in their PPI work, and in doing so provided examples of how neoliberal appeals for self-regulation and self-determination also permeated their own identity positions. CONCLUSIONS: When including patient voices in measuring and defining 'quality', governments and public health practitioners should be aware of how neoliberal rationalities at the heart of policy and services may discourage consumers from claiming rights to quality care by contributing to public unwillingness to challenge the status quo in service provision. If the democratic potential of patient and public involvement initiatives is to be realised, it will be crucial to help citizens to engage critically with how neoliberal rationalities can undermine their abilities to demand quality care