Mobile phones as an organizational tool in hospitals. Mediation of clinicians’ practices and communication : Ph.d.-projekt.

Ph.D. projekt.
Hospitals are implementing mobile phones as an organizational tool, in order to improve the availability of each individual employee. Earlier hospital staff had to walk around searching for each other when contact was needed, whereas now they use mobile phones to call each other. This entails that clinicians carry a mobile working phone each, where they receive calls from patients, alarms from electronic surveillance equipment as well as conversations from colleges, collaborators and patient relatives. The phone cannot be switched off or made silent, thus it rings when clinicians are performing tasks or engaging in interpersonal communication.
The actions of the clinicians in every present moment are made possible because of the affordances of material artefacts and conditions. Their actions are embodied, materially interwoven and organized around shared practical understandings, with knowledge being continuously and collective constituted within. The mobile phones (being one material artefact) can potentially shape the clinicians´ actions through their material form and properties, and the communicative affordances that the clinicians see in them. As clinicians use their bodies in perceiving and constructing meaningful worlds in interaction with others, a variety of embodied resources is used when they are performing their practices, in order to produce publicly and mutually accountable actions. This also includes spatial dispositions and arrangements of bodies, in order to organize and coordinate interaction, however as mobile phones are embodied and part of the way people choreograph and synchronize body movement in interactions, they can both elaborate and constrain the clinicians´ in their collaborative construction of understanding, assessment and actions.
When carrying out their practices the clinicians will use mobile phones in a certain way, thus enabling or limiting certain bodily and mental activities. Mobile phones being a component of the clinicians´ practices are therefore constitutive elements reproducing the social in relation with the clinicians. Hence this study will take a practice approach in order to explore how mobile phones mediate the practices of clinicians. In doing so the study will understand practices as the clinicians´ routinized bodily performances being connected with mental activities such as aims, emotions, know-how, interpretations etc. Nexus Analysis will be used as methodological approach, focusing on central mediated actions carried out by social actors, with video recordings of clinicians working in a Danish hospital being conducted accordingly. A multi modal analysis will be performed in order to analyze how mobile phones mediate the production and reproduction of structures that enable and constrain the clinicians´ interpretations and actions, how coordination of mobility is mediated, and how practices are been combined. Insight into this is essential in order to support the embodied practices, which are crucial to the achievement of best possible results in patient treatment and care.