In June 2010 we learnt of the success of the Australian Research Council Linkage application for a 3 year research project ‘Remaking practices: learning to meet the challenge of practice change in primary health care’.
The project, building on the work of Ensemble, will investigate learning and the use of technologies in the remaking of professional practices in new models of health care. It is a collaborative project with the HealthOne program in the NSW Department of Health. HealthOne is an integrated primary and community health initiative that brings together GPs, community health and other health professionals in multidisciplinary teams. The HealthOne policy expectation is that the services will be multi-disciplinary, integrated across professional, agency and sectoral boundaries, and developed in an active partnership with health consumers and communities.
The study is framed by understandings of the close relationship of work, learning and change, together with a commitment to participative research methods. It uses an approach that accounts for the relationship between humans and their environment within professional practices. The outcomes will benefit the design and delivery of the HealthOne program and other settings where similar changes in professional practice are occurring.
The research team is multidisciplinary and international lead by Nicky Solomon from University of Technology, Sydney (UTS, Australia), who is an international partner in the Ensemble project. Other UTS researchers are: Alison Lee (Education), Roger Dunston (Health policy researcher), Toni Robertson (IT) and Ros Sorensen (Health) from UTS. The main industry partner is Janet Anderson, who is the Director, Inter-Government & Funding Strategies Branch, NSW Department of Health.
The team also includes Patrick Carmichael from Liverpool John Moores University (UK) and Jill Thistlethwaite from University of Warwick (UK). Patrick will draw on the technological aspects of practice as in Ensemble’s higher education settings to help to investigate the use of semantic technologies for ongoing remaking of practices in health professional settings. Jill is both a medical education academic and a general practitioner in a UK primary health care clinic. She has extensive experience in the development of interprofessional health, workforce and professional curriculum development.
The research aims to:
- produce rich descriptions of the complex and multi-dimensional remaking of health practices as they are being developed in local practice settings
- develop learning processes and practice improvement resources that are collaboratively designed, utilised and evaluated within the research sites
- investigate the role and possibilities of existing and emerging technologies in everyday practice and in achieving practice change
- develop new and more adequate theorisations and conceptualisations of professional practice and learning.
The study is designed to be the first in a program of research. During the review and analysis of the findings of this first project, teams and case based learning sites will be identified for the next project. This selection will take account of the practices most likely to benefit from the development and uptake of case based learning in health care settings utilizing semantic technologies. In the second project the research activities will focus on the co-design, development and exploration of semantic technologies to support case based practice learning across several heath care settings.
