Mapping the territory of renal care: a formative analysis of the cognitive work involved in managing acute kidney injury

Abstract

The design and evaluation of healthcare work systems requires an understanding of the cognitive work involved in healthcare tasks. Previous studies suggest that a formative approach would be particularly useful to examine healthcare activities for this purpose. In the present study, methods from cognitive work analysis and cognitive task analysis are combined in a formative examination of managing acute kidney injury, an activity that occurs across primary and secondary healthcare settings. The analyses are informed by interviews with healthcare practitioners and a review of practice guidelines. The findings highlight ways in which the task setting influenced practitioners' activity, and ways in which practitioners approached the activity (for example, how they used data to make decisions). The approach taken provided a rich understanding of the cognitive work involved, as well as generating suggestions for the design of work systems to support the clinical task.

Local knowledge in rail signalling and balancing trade-offs

“…All of these data were reviewed by the first author to generate decision requirements tables. These are textual tables that captured goals, cues, expectancies, course of action and system characteristics for each of the five scenarios under examination (Phipps et al, 2019). The table for user worked crossings is provided in Table 4 as an example.…”