# University ethnography sits in on the Monday overdue list

> 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.

For fourteen months, a researcher from the
[School of Continuous Improvement](https://slop.university/schools/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_](https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-overdue-immunisation-recall-in-47pdla/),
by [Dr Bram Ntuli](https://slop.university/people/bram-ntuli/), Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement
Grand Rounds, and [Dr Solveig Adeyemi](https://slop.university/people/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.

Source: <https://slop.university/news/2026-11-02-university-ethnography-sits-in-on-the-monday-overdue-list/>\
Licence: [CC-BY-4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)\
Cite as: Swift, B. (2026). _Slop University_ [Artwork]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21199776