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Walsh, Monique

University of British Columbia

Recent policy changes in primary care are asking healthcare professionals to work collaboratively. Although it may be counterintuitive, such collaboration can be understood according to the practice of constructing boundaries. This dissertation is formulated as three distinct interdisciplinary papers that apply a performative ontological lens to exploring how the practice of collaboration changes in primary care workplaces. The first paper contributes to an ongoing dialogue within the field of knowledge management that traces the ways that boundaries and boundary objects are enacted. This paper argues that the construction of these boundaries and boundary objects make the process of collaboration observable and therefore changeable. Comparatively, the second paper draws from the sociology of science and contributes to the field of adult education by investigating the social and material as ontologically entangled. This paper argues that applying multiple sociomaterial concepts helps us to better understand the process of learning and collaboration in the workplace. The third paper is intended as a contribution to practice, specifically to the field of primary care. In this paper, I offer a practical resource that combines theoretical concepts from the first two papers. This paper explores how an awareness of the collaborative process can present practitioners with new ways of approaching collaboration. Across the papers, multiple methods were used to compare primary care collaborations in three distinct time periods during the onset of COVID-19 in Interior British Columbia. First, 15 virtual semi-structured interviews with clinical, administrative, and executive participants were held. Second, a discourse analysis was conducted of Public Health Orders and provincial modelling. Third, dialogic member-checking with the participants was completed. Data were presented in three distinct phases: (1) pre-Wave 1 COVID-19 (January-March 2020); (2) Wave 1 (March-May 2020); and (3) post-Wave 1 (June-August 2020). Data analysis revealed the continually-changing nature of the collaborative process as the construction of boundaries, boundary objects, and assemblages. By better understanding how collaboration and learning is enacted in sociomaterial contexts, this research could potentially improve collaborative outcomes for team members as they strive to enact collaborative policy that is more reflective and efficient.

Text

2023-12-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86767

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/