Nurses stand by, on standby: Summons to multiactivity in a ward

Nursing profession consists of never-ending diagnostic work and she has to treat smells, visual cues and noises from people and machines as being potentially relevant next attention and action spaces A nurse needs to have a broad perspective on the daily routines: which patient is next in line for surgery, does any colleague need assistance, and so on. To do this diagnostic work, nurses move within and between different hospital spaces and, at the same time, their level of attention (Norris, 2004) shifts between local, often occasioned, sites of engagement (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) or contextual configurations (Goodwin, 2000) and more overall activities (that are, of course, also accomplished locally). In the professional literature, this alertness is often ‘hidden’ in the definition of nursing as a symbiosis of communication, ethics for the patient and technical skills. With this study we want to fill part of that gap and describe nursing from a participant perspective and especially how a nurse’s work practice often involves several action trajectories, that is, multi-activity.