The communication patterns in the context of error in an intensive care unit in a Malaysian hospital

Abstract

This paper describes a study that was carried out in an Intensive Care Unit at a hospital in Malaysia. The objective of our work was to define what constitues the context of error during the ward round practice of patient care management considering how artifacts are used during the communication. Thus the work focused on the analysis of communication patterns. As research method, we have applied the ethnography method and used situated cognition as an analytical perspective to synthesize the communications patterns. In this paper we focus on reporting the empirical analyses of the communication patterns in which errors had occurred. The analyses had highlighted how a clinician team conceptualized information and what majorly constitutes the context of error was that the clinical information on the artifacts were represented ‘without a context’.