Problems and Solutions Arising During a Study in Visual Semantics of the Medical Emergency Team System

A study of the medical emergency team (MET) to explore communication within the team, leadership, handover, and MET resuscitation practice was performed using audiovisual recording in hospitals of Sydney South West Area Health Service, Sydney, Australia. In this article, we report on the process of data collection: the completion of 25 video recordings of MET calls across three of the six study hospitals. We describe how we gained entry into hospital environments to film events characterized by the unpredictability and uncertainties associated with resuscitating a patient and the strategies that we implemented during the fieldwork to develop and maintain rapport with both clinicians and managers. We describe how we addressed some of the practical constraints related to collecting audiovisual data at the point of acute care as well as their implications for the theoretical and methodological aspects of the study.