Researching how institutions organise care

My research asks one overarching question: how do institutions organise the conditions under which care becomes possible?

I work from the everyday realities of nursing and healthcare and trace how they are coordinated by policies, professional standards, technologies, organisational routines, labour conditions and wider structures of inequality. Institutional ethnography provides the connective method across my programme; mixed methods, implementation science and process evaluation extend that work into intervention and system change.

Institutional ethnography of nursing and healthcare

My PhD, Ecologies of Care: a posthuman institutional ethnography of nursing, developed posthuman institutional ethnography as a healthcare research method. It combined participatory ethnography, documentary analysis, workforce data, multimedia diaries and interviews to examine how people, policies, technologies and material conditions organise nursing work.

This programme continues in Navigating the System of Regulation and Practice in the UK, which traces tensions between professional accountability and the systemic conditions in which nurses work.

More about institutional ethnography →

Nursing workforce wellbeing and structural inequality

I study stress, burnout, retention and workforce sustainability as institutional and system-level problems rather than individual deficits. This work examines how staffing, gendered expectations, professional ideals, organisational resources and structural inequalities shape the possibility of safe and sustainable care.

Current confirmed work includes PflegeStressPlan, documented through my Charité profile, alongside research on nursing workforce measurement, migration and the structural production of burnout.

Implementation science and process evaluation

I evaluate how complex interventions are understood, adopted, adapted or resisted in real settings. My work combines implementation frameworks, qualitative research, surveys, observation and documentary analysis to explain not only whether an intervention works, but how and under what conditions.

I lead process-evaluation work for the SHORTER trial, a multicentre study of antibiotic duration in critical care.

Responsible health technology and AI

Technologies are not neutral tools: they redistribute judgement, attention, responsibility and power. I examine how electronic systems, clinical algorithms, artificial intelligence and life-support technologies shape professional practice and whose bodies, experiences and assumptions become embedded in healthcare evidence.

This strand connects responsible innovation and algorithmic ethics with the close institutional analysis of how technologies are actually used in clinical work.

Nursing philosophy and critical posthumanism

My philosophical work examines care, personhood, professional ideals, affect, materiality and the more-than-human relations through which nursing takes place. It provides conceptual resources for analysing institutions without reducing care to either individual behaviour or abstract systems.

This work is developed collaboratively through publications, editorial work and The Compost Collaborative, an interdisciplinary collective working across nursing, art, critical theory and affirmative practice.

Current institutional settings

My work is based across Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Edinburgh Napier University’s research repository, with collaborations across healthcare, universities and international nursing-philosophy networks.

Publications → · External profiles and recognition →