Susan Furness
Doctorate
Doctorate Title: Walking in Paramedicine: An Ontological Inquiry.
Doctorate Description: The profession of paramedicine is continually evolving as a result of advances in medical practice, changes to demographics, new technologies, and issues with service distribution and efficiency. These changes have important implications for how paramedics go about their work, and yet, underneath them all, human factors underpin how paramedics make sense of their work and the professional world they inhabit. Much of this sense making is processed through story telling: to each other, within the profession, to our students, and to others.
Based on my own professional experiences as a paramedic over two decades, this research project focuses on ontological aspects of paramedicine; what it means to be a paramedic. It aims to reveal and examine tacit meanings of being through a combination of autoethnography and hermeneutic phenomenology. The autoethnographic narratives presented in this thesis reflect the breadth of experiences involved in doing paramedicine.
The hermeneutic analysis of these narratives reveals three key domains of understanding that are representative of paramedicine practice: being-with others, responding, and controlling. These themes are always present, and are woven into the experiences of being a paramedic. They exist in a variety of ways as a paramedic goes about their everyday work, yet they often remain unnoticed and therefore unexamined. The elaboration of each of these domains provides a pathway to new understanding, showing how paramedicine can be understood through lived experience.
Details:
Type: PhD
University: La Trobe University
Primary Supervisor: Dr Dan Bendrups
Category: Other
Funding: None
Start Date: 2016
End Date: 2018
Status: Complete
Thesis
ThesisResearch Interests
Autoethnography, Autophenomenography
Publications
Paramedic PhD is endorsed by:
