Patient experience data as enacted: Sociomaterial perspectives and ‘singular‐multiples’ in health care quality improvement research

Abstract

Over the last three decades, sociomaterial approaches to the study of health care practices have made an important contribution to the sociology of health care. Significant attention has been paid to the role of technology and artefacts in health care and the operation of actor‐networks but less space has been given to questions of ontological multiplicity in health care practices. In this paper, we draw upon our study of patient experience data in five acute hospitals in England to illustrate how treating patient experience data as ‘singular‐multiples’ can enable useful insights into patient experience data work in health care organisations. Our data was generated during 12 months of fieldwork at five participating hospitals and included organisational documents, field notes, informal and formal interviews with frontline and managerial staff and patient representatives at the study sites. We use the examples of the Friends and Family Test (FFT) and the National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (NCPES) in England to consider the multiple nature of data as it is enacted in practice and the work data does when coordinated as an entity in the singular. We argue that, and discuss how, the sociomaterial insights we discuss here are relevant to health care quality and improvement research and practice.

Fixed and fluid at the same time: how service providers make sense of relapse prevention in Swedish addiction treatment

“…As such, it adds to critical scholarship on local enactments and multiplicity in the public health field, found in this journal (e.g. Dennis, 2017; and in others (Donetto et al, 2021).…”

The qualities of data: how nurses and their managers act on patient feedback in an English hospital

“…Scholarship has also begun to look more closely at the relational aspects of patient experience data in healthcare organisations (Desai et al, 2017, Donetto et al, 2019, Donetto et al, 2021Montgomery et al, 2020;Ziewitz, 2017). For instance, Donetto et al (2019) and Montgomery et al (2020) have both emphasised the relational ways in which frontline healthcare staff understand patient experience, receive patient feedback and act on it to improve care and how certain qualities pertain to data.…”

“…Taking a distinctly anthropological approach to data (see Boellstorff et al, 2015) inflected by sociomaterial perspectives (see, e.g. Donetto et al, 2021), we look closely at the traceable relations of which data is a part and from which it emerges in organisations. In the first section, we look at recent studies of patient experience data, focusing on those that have questioned the stability of data in these contexts.…”

“…Taking a distinctly anthropological approach to data (see Boellstorff et al ., 2015) inflected by sociomaterial perspectives (see, e.g. Donetto et al. , 2021), we look closely at the traceable relations of which data is a part and from which it emerges in organisations.…”

Exploring the work and organisation of local Healthwatch in England: a mixed-methods ethnographic study

“…40 This work explored the mutually influencing relationship between different forms of patient experience data and technologies and the people and institutions that use (or fail to use) them to improve the quality of patient care. [40][41][42] Thinking with ANT meant that we built ethnographic descriptions of how patient experience data came to be formed in any given hospital and how these data were entangled in relationships that enabled them to act to affect improvement.…”