Institutional ethnography: A methodology for exploring complex problems in healthcare systems.

Healthcare professionals experiencing barriers in the delivery of care are often unaware of factors within complex institutions that create and perpetuate those problems. Institutional ethnography in healthcare is a research methodology that starts from the perspective of a problem that clinicians or people receiving care experience and seeks to identify how those negative experiences are coordinated by institutional structures. This paper describes and advocates for the use of institutional ethnography as a powerful tool to investigate problems experienced by individuals or groups in the complex systems of healthcare design and delivery. It is a research methodology that has been adopted across settings in North America, although it has the potential to be utilized more broadly across other settings by clinicians and researchers. This echoes calls from other authors for its use across a wider range of healthcare disciplines and settings. Institutional ethnography is an underutilized research methodology that has potential to address a wide range of challenges experienced in contemporary healthcare. It offers healthcare clinicians the opportunity to better understand and resolve issues affecting their practice within complex healthcare systems.

McLiesh P ，Wiechula R ，Rasmussen P 《-》

Institutional ethnography - a primer.

This review introduces a qualitative methodology called institutional ethnography (IE) to healthcare professionals interested in studying complex social healthcare systems. We provide the historical context in which IE was developed, and explain the principles and terminology in IE for the novice researcher. Through the use of worked examples, the reader will be able to appreciate how IE can be used to approach research questions in the healthcare system that other methods would be unable to answer. We show how IE and qualitative research methods maintain quality and rigour in research findings. We hope to demonstrate to healthcare professionals and researchers that healthcare systems can be analysed as social organisations, and IE may be used to identify and understand how higher-level processes and policies affect day-to-day clinical work. This understanding may allow the formulation and implementation of actionable improvements to solve problems on the ground.

Foo YY ，Tan K ，Xin X ，Lim WS ，Cheng Q ，Rao J ，Tan NC ... -  《-》

Ethnography: principles, practice and potential.

Draper J 《-》

Observation and Institutional Ethnography: Helping Us to See Better.

Balcom S ，Doucet S ，Dubé A 《-》

Why institutional ethnography? Why now? Institutional ethnography in health professions education.

Kearney GP ，Corman MK ，Hart ND ，Johnston JL ，Gormley GJ ... -  《-》