This is the operational work that people do to
enact a set of practices, whether these represent a new technology
or complex healthcare intervention. Like all NPT constructs, it has
four components. These were the first NPT constructs to be
developed and their names reflect qualities of technologies or
complex interventions, rather than the character of the work that
these involve.
3.1 Interactional Workability: This refers to
the interactional work that people do with each other, with
artefacts, and with other elements of a set of practices, when they
seek to operationalize them in everyday settings. For example,
a key problem of telemedicine systems has been shown to be their
negotiation by doctors and patients as they try to communicate
complex clinical information each other over a videoconferencing
link.
3.2 Relational Integration: This refers to the
knowledge work that people do to build accountability and maintain
confidence in a set of practices and in each other as they use
them. A telemedicine system that transmitted clinical images of
skin lesions ran into trouble when individual doctors began to lose
confidence in what these images actually represented, and started
to examine patients in parallel to digitized images - thus doubling
their workload and putting their clinical department under
pressure.
3.3 Skill set Workability: This refers to the
allocation work that underpins the division of labour that is built
up around a set of practices as they are operationalized in the
real world. Who gets to do the work is an important element of
any set of practices. For example, a core problem for a research
group investigating the effectiveness of a decision aid for
medication choice after a a serious illness event was whether the
decision aid should be administered by trial managers with no
clinical responsibility for the patient, or nurse practitioners
actively involved in their care. Allocating the work to the former
meant that the decision aid was more easily delivered, but trial
managers lacked the clinical expertise of the nurse practitioners
which meant that it was hard for them to answer patients'
questions.
3.4 Contextual Integration: This refers to the
resource work - managing a set of practices through the allocation
of different kinds of resources and the execution of protocols,
policies and procedures. Typically, the implementation of a new
set of practices is seen as a management problem, and it's true
that the power to allocate resources and define the processes by
which new technologies or complex interventions are executed in
practice. The work that is involved in this is about resourcing.g
the ways that others enact a new set of practice.