A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement follows two practice nursing teams through their weekly list of overdue childhood immunisations and the telephone calls that come after it.
Two general practices, one weekly printout and the careful art of the recall call
For fourteen months, a researcher from the School of Continuous Improvement took morning tea on Mondays with the nursing teams of two small general practices, and listened to them read a list aloud.
Kept on the List, by Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds, and Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, is an ethnography of the weekly report of children whose immunisations have fallen due, and of the nurses who work through it. The paper describes how each name is sorted into one of five kinds of lateness, and how the telephone call that follows is composed so that no parent is made to feel behind.
We run a standing meeting of our own every fortnight, and we went in thinking we knew what a standing meeting was for. The School intends to keep that question on its list for some time yet.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
The study brings the School’s longstanding interest in review formats into primary care, translating observation, interview and the close reading of everyday routine into an account of how a small team allocates its attention. Dr Adeyemi described the work as “one more stop on the Observatory’s long journey through the rhythms by which organisations look at themselves”.
The paper takes its place alongside the School’s earlier work on recall and on the items a meeting carries forward, and widens the University’s understanding of the quiet craft that sits behind a routine report.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.47pdla.