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Researchers have found that many post-secondary music students suffer from physical and mental health issues. However, researchers have mainly studied these problems at the individual level, with little investigation of how music students' work is shaped by the coordinating effects of policies, texts, and discourses at and beyond their local site. This paper describes a protocol for an international project that will explore the health of music students in the context of their daily work. Using an institutional ethnography approach, we will examine the social organization of music students' work at three universities: two in Canada and one in Australia. This will be the first set of studies that use institutional ethnography specifically for the purpose of understanding how the social organization of music students' work shapes their health. Data will be collected using several methods common to institutional ethnography: interviews, focus groups, observations, and collecting texts. Data analysis will begin during the data collection process and proceed in two fluid stages. The first stage will involve a detailed investigation of the pertinent work activities at each music school. The second will involve linking that work to specific social relations within and beyond the institution. After data analysis has been completed at all three sites, findings will be compared to one another to identify commonalities and differences in how students' work is organized. Findings of the entire project may inform policy-making and lead to positive change at the institutions studied, as well as others where similar social organization may occur. The novel approach described here will provide opportunities to expand current knowledge about music students' work and health beyond what has been learned through approaches that focus on students' individual behaviours and attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Hospitals in Canada have been subject to intensive reorganization in the past few decades as the public health care system absorbs and adapts to a neoliberal government agenda that promotes more "efficient and effective" use of public funds and increased involvement on the part of the private sector. A massive infusion of public money for health information technology and health services research has created the capacity to generate objectified knowledge and to use it to reform the health care system--both its organization and, increasingly, its therapeutics--with the promise of making it all work better. The research reported here is on the engagement of professional nurses in their everyday/night work in restructured hospitals and on how nursing practice is being reshaped in consequence. Our research approach, institutional ethnography, focuses on the social organization of health knowledge from the standpoint of those involved in and subordinated to its managerial uses, in this case, the nurses. We argue that a new form of ruling is being deployed. Nurses play an active part in the subordination of their own professional judgment to the objectified knowledge and knowledge-based practices that externalize decision making and reposition authoritative knowing. The paper describes and discusses the conduct of an institutional ethnographic inquiry (RANKIN & CAMPBELL, 2006) and illustrates some of its distinctive features using examples from our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomedical advances in healthcare and antiretroviral treatment or therapy (ART) have transformed HIV/AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease. Studies demonstrate that people living with HIV who adhere to antiretroviral therapy can achieve viral suppression or undetectability, which is fundamental for optimizing health outcomes, decreasing HIV-related mortality and morbidity, and preventing HIV transmission. African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) communities in Canada remain structurally disadvantaged and bear a disproportionate burden of HIV despite biomedical advancements in HIV treatment and prevention. This institutional ethnography orients to the concept of 'structural violence' to illuminate how inequities shape the daily experiences of ACB people living with HIV across the HIV care cascade. We conducted textual analysis and in-depth interviews with ACB people living with HIV (n = 20) and health professionals including healthcare providers, social workers, frontline workers, and health policy actors (n = 15). Study findings produce a cumulative understanding that biomedical HIV discourses and practices ignore structural violence embedded in Canada's social fabric, including legislation, policies and institutional practices that produce inequities and shape the social world of Black communities. Findings show that inequities in structural and social determinants of health such as food insecurity, financial and housing instability, homelessness, precarious immigration status, stigma, racial discrimination, anti-Black racism, criminalization of HIV non-disclosure, health systems barriers and privacy concerns intersect to constrain engagement and retention in HIV healthcare and ART adherence, contributing to the uncertainty of achieving and maintaining undetectability and violating their right to health. Biomedical discourses and practices, and inequities reduce Black people to a stigmatized, pathologized, and impoverished detectable viral underclass. Black people perceived as nonadherent to ART and maintain detectable viral loads are considered "bad" patients while privileged individuals who achieve undetectability are considered "good" patients. An effective response to ending HIV/AIDS requires implementing policies and institutional practices that address inequities in structural and social determinants of health among ACB people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed within ecological and institutional ethnography perspectives, and situated within a larger study of beginning teachers in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, this paper focuses on the dramatically different experiences of one beginning teacher who happened to secure half-time contracts in two rural schools within commuting distance of one another. His account of these experiences and how he makes sense of them orient researchers to the broad social, economic, and material conditions that organize the mutually dependent work of parents and teachers. This analysis contributes to beginning teacher research by affirming the value of personal stories of learning to teach, moving beyond studies of individual adaptation to fixed notions of professional success, and opening to scrutiny the shared conditions of early and later career teachers as they are institutionally and discursively organized, thus promoting appreciation of the complexities of learning to teach attuned to variation in local rural circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fetal health surveillance is a significant everyday work responsibility for labor and delivery nurses. Here, nursing care is increasingly focused on technological interventions, particularly with the use of continuous electronic fetal monitoring. Using Institutional Ethnography, we explored how nurses conduct this work and uncovered the ruling relations coordinating how nurses "do" fetal health surveillance. Analysis revealed how these powerful ruling relations associated with the biomedical and medical-legal discourses coordinated nurses' fetal monitoring work. Forms requiring documentation of biophysical data caused nurses to focus on technological interventions with much less attention given to holistic and supportive care measures. In doing so, nurses inadvertently activated and participated in these powerful ruling discourses. The practice of ensuring the safe birth of the baby through advances in technological surveillance and medical interventions took priority over well-established approaches to holistic nursing care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning is the property of Society for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: This is a study involving three HIV clinics in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Manitoba. We sought to identify ethical issues involving health care providers and clinic clients in these settings, and to gain an understanding of how different ethical issues are managed by these groups.Methods: We used an institutional ethnographic method to investigate ethical issues in HIV clinics. Our researcher conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews, compiled participant observation notes, and studied health records in order to document ethical issues in the clinics, and to understand how health care providers and clinic clients manage and resolve these issues.Results: We found that health care providers and clinic clients have developed work processes for managing ethical issues of various types: conflicts between client-autonomy and public health priorities ("treatment as prevention"), difficulties associated with the criminalization of nondisclosure of HIV positive status, challenges with non-adherence to HIV treatment, the protection of confidentiality, barriers to treatment access, and negative social determinants of health and well-being.Conclusions: Some ethical issues resulted from structural disadvantages experienced by clinic clients. The most striking findings in our study were the negative social determinants of health and well-being experienced by some clinic clients - such as experiences of violence and trauma, poverty, racism, colonization, homelessness, and other factors affecting well-being such as problematic substance use. These negative determinants were at the root of other ethical issues, and are themselves of ethical concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Chronic disease is a global concern. While ample research has aimed to identify the epidemiology of multimorbidity and patient complexity using administrative data, little attention has been paid to the processes of care that treating complex patients entail. Consequently, the concept of patient complexity itself does not directly speak to how challenging it may be to care for a given patient. The purpose of this study was to investigate how primary care providers define, encounter, and manage complex patients, especially those with chronic pain. To our knowledge, this is the first study to move beyond general narrative descriptions of complexity towards an interrogation that is grounded in the work practices of caring for these patients. Methods: We undertook an institutional ethnography (IE) in Ontario, Canada. IE uses people's everyday work problems as the starting point for an exploration of the often-invisible social relations that orient experiences. Grounded in the everyday experience of primary care providers, we draw here on 51 interviews that were collected as part of our larger IE study, to interrogate the utility of definitions of patient complexity as medical multimorbidity. Findings: Care providers consider patients challenging due to their socio-economic status more so than their medical problems alone. Our data shows that patients' issues are often bound up with poverty, trauma, and mental health concerns, and are challenging for health care providers in part because the interventions needed exceed the scope of their medical expertise, while social issues render the treatment of potentially straightforward medical problems complicated. This was especially so for patients with chronic pain. Conclusion: Defining patient complexity as morbidity alone is inadequate; such models neglect syndromes and conditions that are not included in formal disease classifications. Chronic pain should be included among the chronic conditions that are considered to constitute multimorbidity. In order to provide effective patient-centered care, discussions of patient complexity must also attend to the complex social and economic circumstances in which many patients live and include broader issues of inequity and social justice. This approach would enable policies to better support primary care providers who struggle to manage their patients with complex needs across domains of physiological health, mental health, and the quality of their living conditions, and in so doing improve the care that patients receive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]