- Title
- The remedy lies in resistance: an ethnographic study of social work knowledge in multidisciplinary public health teams
- Creator
- Cootes, Hannah Elizabeth
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Today’s health challenges are complex, chronic, and connected, necessitating health systems to adapt and evolve. It is now recognised that this requires the meaningful integration of medical and social care professions in health care teams, to best respond to the social determinants that shape health and illness outcomes over the life course. Social work, globally, has a commitment to promoting socially conscious practice in health care, however it lacks a strong evidence base, and its foothold within the contemporary hospital enterprise is yet to be fully established. Even less clear is how social workers collaborate with other health professionals and exactly what knowledge they contribute to multidisciplinary health care delivery. Responding to this context, I aimed to explore the role and function of social work knowledge within multidisciplinary public health teams. Critical ethnography was used as the research methodology and data collection method. I conducted 8 months of fieldwork in a large, tertiary hospital situated in metropolitan New South Wales, Australia, that was, at the time, responding to the peak levels of COVID-19 pandemic disruption and upheaval. The ethnography of seven multidisciplinary social work roles was supplemented by Australian-wide, semi-structured interviews, recruiting a total of 15 health social workers, and five multidisciplinary health professionals. My analysis used a novel theoretical approach, drawing from Miranda Fricker’s epistemic injustice as a phenomenon and Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy as the praxis, highlighting everyday problems and opportunities for social work knowledge with sharp relief. The developed study themes led to three conclusions: i) social work knowledge is heavily iv influenced by the social processes in which it is produced, and the transformative power of comparative credibility in multidisciplinary health team contexts; ii) social workers actively and deliberately resist knowledge constraints and problems within interprofessional team contexts in both overt and covert ways; iii) social work knowledge offers important downstream solidarity with the public health discipline. Findings underscored the importance of attending to social workers’ distinct narrative health competencies and skills in solidarity, brokering knowledge between the team, systems, patients, and families for public health. This can serve to mitigate the marginalisation of social knowledge within the dominant, biomedical paradigm of the multidisciplinary team, and offer epistemic fulfilment in return. Of theoretical significance, I developed the concept of socio-epistemic knowledge; as a form of tacit knowledge that is rooted in resistance and used by social workers across integrated contexts. Future practice, research, education, and policy recommendations are also considered.
- Subject
- health social work; multidisciplinary; public health; epistemic injustice
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1513656
- Identifier
- uon:56757
- Rights
- Copyright 2024 Hannah Elizabeth Cootes
- Language
- eng
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 247 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |