Principal speaker
Professor Mark Saunders
Abstract: This research explores how elective surgical patients make sense of their hospitalization experiences. We explore sensemaking using longitudinal narrative interviews with 38 patients undergoing elective surgical procedures between June 2010 and February 2011. We consider patients' narratives, the stories they tell of their prior expectations, and subsequent post-surgery experiences of their care in a United Kingdom (UK) hospital.
An emergent pre-surgery theme is that of a paradoxical position in which they choose to make themselves vulnerable by agreeing to surgery to enhance their health, this necessitating trust of clinicians (doctors and nurses). To make sense of their situation, patients draw on technical (doctors' expert knowledge and skills), bureaucratic (National Health Service as a revered institution) and ideological (hospitals as places of safety), discourses. Post-operatively, themes of ‘chaos’ and ‘suffering’ emerge from the narratives of patients whose pre-surgery expectations (and trust) have been violated. Their stories tell of unmet expectations and of inability to make shared sense of experiences with clinicians who are responsible for their care.
Speaker: Mark Saunders is Professor of Business Research Methods at the Surrey Business School, UK. He was Faculty Director of Postgraduate Research Programmes for Business, Economics and Law from 2011 - 2014, and was recently awarded a Fellowship of the British Academy of Management.
His areas of expertise are research methods, including online research methods, methods for researching trust, the development of process consultation tools to learn about and improve organisational relationships; and the human resource aspects of management of change.
He has published in a range of journals including Field Methods and Human Performance, Human Relations, and Journal of Small Business Management and recent books include Handbook of Research Methods on Trust (2012, 2015 forthcoming; Edward Elgar)
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RSVP on or before Friday 27 February 2015 , by email wow@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 37353714