Ethnography in Healthcare

Summary

Ethnography in healthcare examines how medical work, knowledge, and care are accomplished through everyday practices in clinical and organizational settings. Ethnographic methods have been used to study medicine as a situated, organizational, and sociomaterial practice rather than as the application of abstract scientific knowledge to biological bodies. Key developments in this field can be divided into four historical phases: early ethnographies of the medical profession and hospital life; studies of the body, doctor-patient interaction, and the social organization of clinical work; engagements with medical technologies, infrastructures, and protocols; and care-centered approaches that conceptualize healthcare as a field in which bodies, diseases, and forms of life are enacted through sociomaterial practices. Across all these perspectives, ethnography is a methodological approach uniquely suited to capturing the complexity of healthcare processes, making visible how knowledge, technology, and care are produced and sustained in practice.