Paper short abstract:

During COVID-19, hospital ethnographies were impossible, but understanding doctors’ experiences of the pandemic was key to support wellbeing and improve healthcare work. We detail use of a new ethnographic approach, MIME, to virtually ‘shadow’ doctors and co-create insight into their experiences.

Paper long abstract:

With the arrival of COVID-19 in Ireland, hospital-based ethnographies were immediately scuppered, as researchers’ hospital site-access was not only biomedically unsafe due to viral transmission risk, but ethically questionable during such intense disruption. However, it was crucial to understand COVID working experiences of Ireland’s hospital doctors, already in a strained system before the pandemic, to help advise efforts for system recovery and future preparedness. Yet how to understand the “work as done” (Shorrock 2016) of hospital doctors in the pandemic without being in the hospital?

Drawing on existing epistemologies of remote (Postill 2017), digital (Varis 2015) and proxy (Plowman 2017) ethnography, we designed Mobile Instant Messaging Ethnography as a solution to the restrictions of the pandemic on ethnographic methodology. We recruited 28 hospital doctors as ethnographic interlocutors, and spent 3 months exchanging WhatsApp messages several times a week, asking for descriptions, thoughts and feelings about work and interactions during the day. Interlocutors sent messages in and beyond work, detailing not only what they did but why it happened and how they felt. The resulting data provided a collaboratively-generated understanding of the work hospital doctors do, the institutional and professional contexts in which they do it, and the impacts on their lived experience of professional identity both within and beyond work.

In this paper, we share insights from researchers and interlocutors on undertaking MIME together, on the potential for digital technology combined with ethnographic epistemology to provide new ways of “being there” and collaboratively make meaning of lived experience.