Transitional Care Learning in Nursing Students' Clinical Practice: Adding Institutional Ethnography to the Toolbox in Health Education Research

Institutional ethnography (IE) (Smith 2005, 2008) offers a critical qualitative approach to doing research in health profession education that has yet to be integrated in the work of health care researchers (Ng, Bisaillon, and Webster, 2016; Tummons, 2018). In showing how IE can be used in health profession education research, an ongoing PhD project is used as an example. The project investigates what happens in clinical praxis in the Danish health system, when nursing students are a part of transitional care during their last clinical part of their 3½ year nurse education. The clinical education takes place in hospitals and municipalities and IE enables an insight in the ruling relations in the students’ everyday lives in these settings.
IE is a feminist ‘method of inquiry’, highlighting standpoint as central. Therefore, the fieldwork is conducted by participant observation and interviews with 7 nursing students. Also interviews with the clinical supervisors at each setting are part of the empirical material consisting of 22 days of observation and a total of 13 interviews. In planning and conducting the fieldwork, IE terminology is used in the observation guide to maintain the researchers focus on ruling relations in the students’ everyday lives in clinical praxis.
In illuminating these ruling relations, the analysis revolves around the students’ work knowledge and a focus on local and extra local texts (Smith and Griffith, 2022). Preliminary findings indicate that nursing students have little or no focus on transitional care in their everyday learning environment.