Medical cartoons about interprofessional collaboration in health care
I had the pleasure of working with Drs. Marco Versluis, Titia van Duin and Marco Antonio de Carvalho-Filho to create a series of cartoons about the experience of junior doctors at the beginning of their career. The cartoons are based on research at the University Medical Center Groningen. This research involved interviews with young doctors based on the Rich Picture Technique; The young doctors were asked to make a drawing about a situation. That drawing would then be the center of the conversation. The research describes how yong doctors, who are transitioning from student to doctor, view interprofessional collaboration.
about the research
Wandering the landscape: junior doctors’ experiences with interprofessional collaboration. A rich picture study.
The transition from medical student to junior doctor is challenging. Junior doctors need to become part of the physician community of practice (CoP), while dealing with new responsibilities, tasks and expectations. At the same time, they need to learn how to navigate the frontiers and intersections with the other communities of practice that form the Landscape of Practice (LoP). This study aims to understand how junior doctors experience interprofessional collaboration (IPC) and what elements shape these experiences considering their transition to clinical practice.
13 junior doctors individually drew two rich pictures of IPC experiences, one positive and one negative. A rich picture is a visual representation, a drawing of a particular situation intended to capture the complex and non-verbal elements of an experience. Semi-structured interviews were used to deepen the understanding of junior doctors' depicted IPC experiences. Both visual materials and interview transcripts were iteratively analyzed, for which an inductive constructivist thematic analysis was adopted.
The cartoons depict some of the most common findings in this research. First, the most common findings were discussed, as well as the best way to visualize them. Then, I started sketching; a very rough first draft, that is shown below:
After feedback was gathered on the rough sketches, a more refined version of the illustration was created for cartoons 1 up to 3. For cartoon 4, a completely new approach was chosen. The final medical illustrations are shown below:
Curious to see more?
Click on the images below to have a look at more medical illustrations I worked on.
