Bringing humanity into view: action research with Qatar’s ambulance service

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the widening of attention in healthcare improvement efforts, to include an awareness of the humanity of people who work in the sector and an appreciation of the part human connection plays in engagement around good quality work. Theoretical frameworks and research approaches which draw on action-based, interpretive and systemic thinking are proposed, as a complement to current practices.

The paper describes the early stages of an action research (AR) project, which used the appreciative inquiry “4D” framework to conduct participative inquiry in Hamad Medical Corporation’s ambulance service in Qatar, in which staff became co-researchers.

The co-researchers were highly motivated to work with improvement goals as a result of their participation in the AR. They, and their managers, saw each other and the work in new ways and discovered that they had much to offer.

This was a small-scale pilot project, from which findings must be considered tentative. The challenges of establishing good collaboration across language, culture and organisational divides are considerable.

Appreciative and action-oriented inquiry methods can serve not only to find things out, but also to highlight and give value to aspects of humanity in the workplace that are routinely left invisible in formal processes. This, in turn, can help with quality improvement.

This paper is a challenge to the orthodox way of viewing healthcare organisations, and improvement processes within them, as reliant on control rather than empowerment. An alternative is to actively include the agency, sense-making capacity and humanity of those involved.