The qualities of data: how nurses and their managers act on patient feedback in an English hospital
Journal of Organizational Ethnography
ISSN: 2046-6749
Article publication date: 14 June 2023
Issue publication date: 24 July 2023
Abstract
Purpose
To investigate ethnographically how patient experience data, as a named category in healthcare organisations, is actively “made” through the co-creative interactions of data, people and meanings in English hospitals.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on fieldnotes, interview recordings and transcripts produced from 13 months (2016–2017) of ethnographic research on patient experience data work at five acute English National Health Service (NHS) hospitals, including observation, chats, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. Research sites were selected based on performance in a national Adult Inpatient Survey, location, size, willingness to participate and research burden. Using an analytical approach inspired by actor–network theory (ANT), the authors examine how data acquired meanings and were made to act by clinical and administrative staff during a type of meeting called a “learning session” at one of the hospital study sites.
Findings
The authors found that the processes of systematisation in healthcare organisations to act on patient feedback to improve to the quality of care, and involving frontline healthcare staff and their senior managers, produced shifting understandings of what counts as “data” and how to make changes in response to it. Their interactions produced multiple definitions of “experience”, “data” and “improvement” which came to co-exist in the same systematised encounter.
Originality/value
The article's distinctive contribution is to analyse how patient experience data gain particular attributes. It suggests that healthcare organisations and researchers should recognise that acting on data in standardised ways will constantly create new definitions and possibilities of such data, escaping organisational and scholarly attempts at mastery.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors also thank their colleague, Dr Mary Adams, King’s College London, who conducted some of the data collection in this project but is not an author of this article. They thank her for her contributions and insights.
Funding: This study was funded by the NIHR HSDR Programme (project number: 14/156/08). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.
Citation
Desai, A., Zoccatelli, G., Donetto, S., Robert, G., Allen, D., Rafferty, A.M. and Brearley, S. (2023), "The qualities of data: how nurses and their managers act on patient feedback in an English hospital", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 194-208. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-06-2022-0014
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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