A conceptual framework for unlearning in a homecare setting

Many researchers who have investigated healthcare organizations have indicated that healthcare professionals are likely to be burdened with outdated knowledge. Researchers have argued that knowledge underpins the practices and routines that workers engage in. In some cases, this knowledge is explicit but it may also be embedded in the structure of practices, technological systems, and encoded in the habits and beliefs and assumptions of individuals providing healthcare services. In this paper, we focus on the need for creating an organizational context that enables the questioning of established knowledge, habits, beliefs and assumptions as a prerequisite to identifying inappropriate or obsolete knowledge underpinning and/or embedded in existing practices and routines. The framework is customized and consists of three constituent components: (1) a framework characterizing the lens through which individuals view situations; (2) a framework for characterizing how individual habits change, and (3) a framework for characterizing the manner in which emergent understandings are consolidated into existing knowledge and knowledge structures.