Marlot Kuiper

39 The news media Checklist fits these purposes. I therefore want to emphasize that this book is by no means judgmental. Next, when in the field, I encountered different responses to severe media attention. In arranging access to the field, I have had several conversations with both managerial actors and professionals in the operating theatre (see also chapter 4). It occurred to me that individuals working in the Quality and Safety departments, Research departments, and Executive Boards were more than curious to know what I planned to do , and particularly, what I subsequently planned to write down. It is not that I felt restricted as a researcher, rather, I recognized these individuals’ efforts to protect their institute and the professionals working in it. The professionals working in the surgery department whom I shadowed on the other hand, were very open. Moreover, several times I had the impression that they were willing to show me what they were doing under the veil of “we have nothing to hide”. None of the professionals put any restrictions on what I would write or asked critical questions about how the research findings would be published. Indeed, all the professionals who have been part of this research seemed comfortable letting me into their worlds. I suspect this also has to do with the novelty of having an outsider profess fascination with the particulars of your everyday work. Nonetheless, during the empirical work, I did see professionals struggle with media attention. On the one hand, some of them felt like it was not about them; not their hospital, or not their department. The fact that professionals made this explicit; “it is not our department” made me all the more aware that professionals tend to identify themselves with their own professional segment, more than the hospital they are working in. (See also the paragraph ‘becoming a professional’ in chapter 2). This made them continue doing what they always had been done. On the other hand, media attention led to tensions in reporting calamities. Debates in the coffee room, fuelled by actual cases at hand, embodied an experienced tension between reporting for the sake of learning versus reporting for the sake of public scrutiny. In the various intermezzos and in chapter four ‘On Ethnograph ing ’ I will further elaborate on contextual developments, my role as researcher, and my experiences, and how these might have influenced the findings of this study.