Wandering the Wards

Wandering the Wards provides a detailed and unflinching ethnographic examination of life within the contemporary hospital. It reveals the institutional and ward cultures that inform the organisation and delivery of everyday care for one of the largest populations within them: people living with dementia who require urgent unscheduled hospital care.
Drawing on five years of research embedded in acute wards in the UK, the authors follow people living with dementia through their admission, shadowing hospital staff as they interact with them during and across shifts. In a major contribution to the tradition of hospital ethnography, this book provides a valuable analysis of the organisation and delivery of routine care and everyday interactions at the bedside, which reveal the powerful continuities and durability of ward cultures of care and their impacts on people living with dementia.
*Shortlisted for the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize 2021*

Katie Featherstone is Professor of Sociology and Medicine, and Director of the Geller Institute of Ageing and Memory within the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of West London, UK. Andy Northcott is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Medicine within the Geller Institute of Ageing and Memory at the University of West London, UK.

1. Ward cultures of care; 2. Ward life; 3. Visibilities and invisibilities; 4. Recognition and attribution of dementia at the bedside; 5. Tightening of the timetables and the organisation of bedside care; 6. Bedside talk and communicating the "rules" of the ward; 7. Organisational cultures of containment, restriction and restraint; 8. Wandering the wards