When the Place of Care Is Hybrid: An Ethnographic Study of Hospital Video Consultations

Based on ethnographic observations of hospital video consultations between clinicians and patients, this article investigates the shifting places of care when consultations are displaced from the clinic. While information and communication technologies allow care across distance, scholars within science and technology studies (STS) and sociology have demonstrated how places still matter to the delivery of healthcare services. However, as healthcare increasingly enters the digital realm, we need a vocabulary and analytics which also address virtual environments' constitutive effects as places of care. This article argues that place must be understood as more than the locations of the consulting parties and be expanded to include the virtual places created during video consultations. Drawing on insights from STS and computer-supported cooperative work, the concept of hybrid place is proposed to capture the spatial hybridity of video consultations when physical locations are virtually connected and projected into virtual environments. The concept becomes a useful heuristic for understanding the spatial reconfiguration of the place of care during video consultations; it brings attention to the multiplicity of places, their connections and their distinct conditions which co-shape the virtual clinical encounter.