Wednesday 7 January 2015

Strategies for doing fieldwork for health technology design


The cartoons in this blog post are  from Fieldwork for Healthcare: Guidance for Investigating Human Factors in Computing Systems© 2015 Morgan and Claypool Publishers, www.morganclaypool.com. Used with permission.
One of the themes within CHI+MED has been better understanding how interactive medical devices are used in practice, recognising that there are often important differences between work as imagined and work as done.  This has meant working with many people directly involved in healthcare (clinicians, patients, relatives) to understand their work when interacting with medical devices: observing their interactions and interviewing them about their experiences. But doing fieldwork in hospitals and in people’s homes is challenging:
  • You need to get formal ethical clearance to conduct any study involving clinicians or patients. As I’ve noted previously, this can be time-consuming and frustrating. It also means that it can be difficult to change the study design once you discover that things aren’t quite the way you’d imagined, however much preparatory work you’d tried to do. 
  • Hospitals are populated by people from all walks of life, old and young, from many cultures and often in very vulnerable situations. They, their privacy and their confidentiality need to be respected at all times.
  • Staff are working under high pressure. Their work is part-planned, part-reactive, and the environment is complex: organisationally, physically, and professionally. The work is safety-critical, and there is a widespread culture of accountability and blame that can make people wary of being observed by outsiders.
  • Health is a caring profession and, for the vast majority of staff, technology use is a means to an end; the design of that technology is not of interest (beyond being a source of frustration in their work).
  • You’re always an ‘outsider’: not staff, not patient, not visitor, and that’s a role that it can be difficult to make sense of (both for yourself and for the people you’re working with).
  • Given the safety-critical nature of most technologies in healthcare, you can’t just prototype and test ‘in the wild’, so it can be difficult to work out how to improve practices through design.

When CHI+MED started, we couldn’t find many useful resources to guide us in designing and conducting studies, so we found ourselves ‘learning on the job’. And through discussions with others we realised that we were not alone: that other researchers had very similar experiences to ours, and that we could learn a lot from each other.

So we pooled expertise to develop resources to give future researchers a ‘leg up’ for planning and conducting studies. And we hope that the results are useful resources for future researchers:

  • We’ve recently published a journal paper that focuses on themes of gaining access; developing good relations with clinicians and patients; being outsiders in healthcare settings; and managing the cultural divide between technology human factors and clinical practice.
  • We’ve published two books on doing fieldwork in healthcare. The first volume reported the experiences of researchers through 12 case studies, covering experiences in hospitals and in people’s homes, in both developed and developing countries. The second volume presents guidance and advice on doing fieldwork in healthcare. The chapters cover ethical issues, preparing for the context and networking, developing a data collection plan, implementing a technology or practice, and thinking about impact.
  • Most of our work is neither pure ethnography nor pure Grounded Theory, but somewhere between the two in terms of both data gathering and analysis techniques: semi-structured, interpretivist, pragmatic. There isn’t an agreed name for this, but we’re calling them semi-structuredqualitative studies, and have written about them in these terms.

If you know of other useful resources, do please let us know!

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