Ethnography: The Rhetoric Of Patient And Family Centered Care

Summary of an Ethnography For this assignment, the ethnography I found was titled “The Rhetoric of Patient and Family Centered Care: An Institutional Ethnography into what Actually Happens” written by Janet M. Rankin. This ethnography focused on patient and family centered care within the hospital and how nurses use technology (computers) in their work. It begins by talking about the patients and nurses whose interactions were to be observed. This is followed by a detailed explanation on what exactly an institutional ethnography is, which according to Rankin, it “describes and tracks people’s work (any purposeful activity) and looks for the empirical links (texts, talk, ‘goings on’) that are ‘explicated’ to show what is happening” (Rankin,

When entering data, the nurses had a list of check-boxes they could check, they could not input the data by typing. An example from this essay was when the patient required a lot of assistance and time to be sat up, the software could only document “mobility assist” without other notes. Additionally, the nurses had no way to document her tremor and difficulty writing notes in this software system (Rankin, 531). Furthermore, this software is focused on getting the patients in and out of the hospital as quickly as possible; each patient has certain guidelines that must be met in order for them to be released. This may work well for the nurses, but the families involved do not understand why the nurses act as if they want the patients to be discharged as quickly as possible. The conclusion of this ethnography resulted in a greater understanding of what goes into patient and family centered care within the hospital, as well as the limited capabilities the computers/software have in this