Using video-reflexive ethnography to understand complexity and change practice.

BACKGROUND: A range of research methods have been used to understand effective workplace learning in the health professions. The impact of findings from this research usually requires knowledge translation activities in the form of faculty development initiatives, such as supervisor workshops. Far rarer, but with greater potential, are research approaches that concurrently seek to understand and change practice through empowering clinicians to refine aspects of their practice. METHODS: In this methodological article, we describe video-reflexive ethnography (VRE), a collaborative visual research approach that seeks to capture, illuminate and optimise in situ work and education practices. VRE usually has three phases; initial familiarisation with practice through field observations, followed by video-recording of practice, and lastly reflexive sessions about the edited footage with participants and researchers. We discuss four key principles of VRE 1) exnovation, 2) collaboration, 3) reflexivity and 4) care, drawing on our own experiences as researchers using VRE. DISCUSSION: Although VRE has been used to illuminate and understand health professionals' education, its potential for changing clinical education practices has yet to be realised. VRE enables observation of the social and relational interactions in healthcare practice and empowers individual (and group) perspectives to be articulated and analysed. In this way it can capture the difficult-to-access emotional dimensions of clinical practice as well as the procedural and conceptual ones. VRE can prompt fresh perspectives and insights into healthcare education and practice for researchers and clinicians through shared deliberations about how practice might be reimagined and enacted.