Looking into a healthcare learning practice: When technology has a voice in resuscitating a patient. A study of interaction between trained nurses, the simulated patient and the defibrillator

New technologies in health care assist the health care professional in their jobs. Traditionally, the professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) or the clinical eye (Benner, Tanner, & Chesla, 2009) has been seen as the most important factor for nurses and doctors in order to understand and take care of a patient (Kjær, Sørensen, & Raudaskoski, Forthcoming). However new technologies such as the defibrillator that verbally instructs the healthcare professionals about ‘what to do and do next’ changes the traditional way of interaction and thus the clinical vision. In this paper I argue that the spoken voice of the defibrillator is an important part of the participation framework (Goffman, 1981). I show through authentic interactional (Garfinkel, 1967) video data (Heath, Hindmarsh, & Luff, 2010), how nurses interact with the new technology and the simulated patient in a training situation, trying to resuscitate the ‘patient’ listening to the defibrillator. Using EMCA (Mondada, 2011; Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 2007) I will present how the nurses learning and interacting with the resuscitating ‘patient’ are pausing and waiting to act when the defibrillator speaks out: My claim is that the healthcare professionals forget their own professional vision and mostly listen to and obey the technology that speaks out.