Surgical procedures rely upon an array of commonplace tools, implements and materials that mediate practice and disciplinary collaboration within the operating theatre. Substantial time is dedicated to the issue and provision of these artefacts and their timely exchange is critical to the successful accomplishment of surgical procedures. In this article, we consider the practice, knowledge and agency that informs how particular implements and materials are passed by the scrub nurse to the surgeon that in turn enables their deployment with regard to the particular procedure and the contingencies 'at hand'.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSociol Health Illn
September 2009
In this paper we address the ways in which surgeons, in collaboration with other members of the surgical team, create occasions for demonstration and instruction within the highly complex and demanding tasks of a surgical operation. Drawing on video recordings of surgical operations, augmented by field studies, we examine how particular phenomena and procedures are made accessible and intelligible to trainees and the ways in which brief episodes of insight and instruction enable complex procedures to be followed and understood. We consider the ways in which demonstration and instruction are achieved, whilst preserving the integrity of medical practice, and explore how trainees are provided with the opportunity to witness, and learn from, the contingent deployment of formal procedures in particular cases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this article we examine how one of the most pervasive technological implementations in the healthcare domain--the alarm system--is used in anaesthesiology as part of patient monitoring. The utility and appropriateness of alarms in healthcare domains have been widely addressed in the literature. However, we argue that we still know little about the practical use of alarm systems in actual healthcare practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: Video has long been recognised as providing an important resource within medical education, particularly, perhaps, for training in primary health care. As a resource for research, and more specifically within qualitative social science studies of medical practice, video has proved less pervasive, despite its obvious advantages.
Methods: In this paper, we sketch an approach to using video to inform the analysis of medical practice and the ways in which health care is accomplished through social interaction and collaboration.
One of the most significant developments in healthcare over the past 25 years has been the widespread deployment of information and communication technologies. These technologies have had a wide-ranging impact on the organisation of healthcare, on professional practice and on patients' experience of illness and its management. In this paper we discuss the ways in which Sociology of Health and illness has provided a forum for the analysis of these new technologies in healthcare.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite the widespread deployment of CCTV through most major cities and towns in great Britain, and the importance of surveillance to contemporary debates within the social sciences, there remains relatively little detailed research concerned with the practical use of these technologies in the workplace. In this paper, we examine how personnel in the operation rooms in London Underground use CCTV and related equipment to identify problems and events and to develop a co-ordinated response. In particular, we consider how personnel configure scenes to make sense of and interpret the conduct of the travelling public in organizationally relevant ways, and how they shape the ways in which both passengers and staff see and respond to each others' actions.
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