Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnography and audio recordings, this study examines palliative care professionals' use of cellphone/smartphone communication in their work of articulating very different people and contexts, while also looking at their negotiations of (smart)phone use within the team.

Paper long abstract:

At the hospital, medical professionals carry out a considerable part of their work through telecommunication devices. In palliative care, where keeping constant contact with the involved parties is crucial for managing end-of-life trajectories, professionals routinely use such devices for making sense of symptoms and events, adjusting medication with patients and relatives, and for sharing information about procedures and decisions with other professionals within the team, the hospital and other institutions. Based on (ongoing) ethnography and recordings in a hospital palliative care team in Portugal, our study shows that professionals use their own smartphones and wifi connections, important resources for real-time communication within the team and with other professionals, sharing new information through voice and text, searching the internet for updated guidelines or information on the geographical availability of services for patients and families, while work cellphones are mostly used for taking/making calls from/to patients and relatives, as well as from/to other health institutions. This appears to be related to the hospital's endorsement of professionals' use of telecommunication technologies while restricting the use of their full potentialities: most cellphones provided by the hospital receive calls and messages but do not allow to call or write back, and security measures limit internet access in hospital computers. Besides, although generally treated as contributing to tasks at hand, (smart)phone use within the team is treated, in some occasions, as problematic for the normal accomplishment of work, leading to negotiations of its temporary restriction (e.g. in weekly team meetings).