Graduate Student, School of Population Health
Thesis Title: Talking to the dead: health care providers and death work practices
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Janet McCalman
Rebecca Kippen Alison Brookes |
About
A PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Health and Society, my research interests are informed by my clincial practice as a registered nurse on a multiple medical specialty ward at one of Melbourne's most acute tertiary hospitals.
After a Grad. Dip, in Bioethics (Monash), I completed a Masters in Health Ethics (Melb.), with a minor thesis exploring the ethical dimensions of a complex clinical case study. A version of the narrative at the heart of this non-empirical study is in Telling Moments: Everyday Ethics in Health Care ("Sick of being sick: Tara's story") by Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam.
I followed this with an empirical research Masters in Social Health, investigating why ICU nurses who speak to their brain-dead patients do so.
My Ph.D. research builds on this - I'm currently investigating the cultural, spiritual, professional and ideological reasons underpinning the practice of health care practitioners who talk to their patients while performing death work.
I'm using a mix of interviews and purpose-written narratives to gather data, which I'm analysing through a combination of thematic and narrative analysis, the latter utilising Gee's stanza creating method.
