Interviews on Time and Care in NHS General Practice, 2020 - 2021

Davies, Stephanie (2024). Interviews on Time and Care in NHS General Practice, 2020 - 2021. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857332

Waiting, Staying and Enduring in General Practice was a 4-year research study (2018 – 2022) based on observations and interviews carried out over the course of 1 year in two NHS general practices in England. Its original aim was to study the relationship between care and time during long periods of ‘watchful waiting’ in general practice. The emphasis on achieving clinical outcomes by adhering to tightly controlled timeframes when providing access, advice and treatments was at odds with the temporalities of much of the healthcare falling within its remit (intractable, complicated, long term and medically unexplained health conditions often with no clear ‘outcomes’). Responding to the discrepancy, this research investigated what forms of care could issue from time in general practice in situations in which nothing appeared to improve or get better. Based on interviews with healthcare workers in clinical and non-clinical roles, observations of routine GP appointments, observations of Balint group meetings and personal testimonies of general practitioners made publicly available online, it explored this understudied area of everyday healthcare through a series of ethnographically derived cases. The study formed part of ‘Waiting Times’, a wider interdisciplinary research project funded by the Wellcome Trust [205400]. This wider project – which ran from 2017 to 2023 and included the work of artists, psychoanalysts, historians and literary scholars – was a collaboration between Exeter University and Birkbeck, University of London, to investigate the temporalities of waiting in healthcare by taking a multi-stranded approach to understanding its significance as a cultural and psychosocial concept, and as an embodied and historical experience. Through this research, we sought to produce a critical theory of temporal endurance that could help to explain why experiences of suspension and waiting are so difficult to tolerate in the present time, and what are the potentialities of waiting as a form of care [https://waitingtimes.exeter.ac.uk/].

Data description (abstract)

These data were collected as part of a four-year Wellcome Trust funded research project tracking the relation between waiting and care in general practice in a moment of overlapping crises for the NHS. A researcher at Birkbeck College set out to observe the forms that waiting could take across all areas of life and work in two Practices: one serving a densely populated urban area in Central East London, the other serving a large rural area in Devon. The transcripts comprise a series of recurring interviews with two general practitioners, and a collection of one-off interviews with other members of the general practice team including reception, managerial and administration workers. All the interviews were carried out between June 2020 and April 2021.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Davies Stephanie	Goldsmiths	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7972-8154

Sponsors:

Wellcome Trust

Grant reference:

Wellcome Trust [205400]

Topic classification:

Health
Society and culture

Keywords:

ARRANGEMENT OF WORKING TIME, MEDICAL CARE, COVID-19, GENERAL PRACTITIONERS, CHRONIC ILLNESS

Project title:

Waiting, Staying and Enduring in General Practice

Alternative title:

Waiting, Staying and Enduring in General Practice

Grant holders:

Lisa Baraitser, Laura Salisbury

Project dates:

From	To
1 September 2017	31 August 2022

Date published:

14 Aug 2024 16:27

Last modified:

14 Aug 2024 16:28

Coverage and Methodology

Temporal coverage:

From	To
30 April 2020	30 April 2021

Collection period:

Date from:	Date to:
9 July 2020	30 April 2021

Geographical area:

East London and Mid-Devon

Country:

United Kingdom

Spatial unit:

Administrative > Counties
Administrative > London Boroughs

Data collection method:

There are fourteen interviews all carried out remotely by the same researcher through online video calls due to the social distancing requirements of the time. They took place over a period of thirteen months.They vary in length, and some are short, ending abruptly. This is because they take place during the working day at a time when general practices were understaffed and under pressure. A single opening prompt is used to guide the conversation towards areas of ongoing or longstanding clinical concern as a pretext for reflecting on relationships between time and care. All the interviews were recorded but to avoid recording copious amounts of patient data, they were not transcribed. Instead, summary notes were taken in the moment by the researcher and written up immediately afterwards. Videos were destroyed after the final notes were taken to comply with the terms set out in the consent form. Two general practitioners appear in eight of the interviews as part of a pre-agreed plan to track their clinical labour over time. The other participants include a Practice Manager, a receptionist, administrative workers, and a Balint group leader. Interview prompts are included in the transcript texts. A blank copy of the information and consent form is stored in the supporting documentation.

Observation unit:

Individual, Organization, Event/Process, Geographic unit, Time unit, Group

Kind of data:

Text

Type of data:

Qualitative and mixed methods data

Resource language:

English

Access and Administration

Data sourcing, processing and preparation:

Data from the interviews has been included in the archive with the explicit consent of all participants both before and after taking part. Interviews where participants have expressed concern about sharing some parts of the data have not been included. Interviews where patient data cannot be fully anonymised have not been included. Names of individuals, organisations and places have been anonymised. The details of some treatment plans have been altered where needed to prevent patient identification. Where a participant has taken part in more than one interview, pseudonyms have been applied consistently to enable continuity and cross-referencing. This archive represents a smaller part of a larger data set predating the pandemic. This includes ethnographic observation of day-to-day life in the surgery, notes from live discussions with groups of GPs, and observations of live patient consultations. Out of this wider data set, the interviews are the only data that could be fully anonymised and archived with the informed consent of all participants. All qualitative data files are formatted using MS Word (doc.). Supporting documentation files are preserved using Adobe Portable Document Formats (pdf.).

Rights owners: