Background: Since 2005, the UK government’s Migration Advisory Committee has listed sonography as an official ‘shortage specialty’ (Migration Advisory Committee, 2019). Work-related musculoskeletal disorder (WRMSD), already widespread among sonographers, is in-creasing due to the additional physical stresses of working in understaffed environments (Harrison & Harris, 2015). While contemporary research has described the broad picture regarding WRMSD in ultrasound (Bolton & Cox, 2015), none has, to date, extensively explored its personal and professional impacts from a qualitative perspective.
Method: Extended semi-structured interviews with N=9 experienced sonographers working in the UK were conducted and analysed using a model of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Miller et al., 2017). Core thematic areas that emphasised personal and professional impacts of WRMSD were then further examined to highlight how participants specifically made sense of them.
Findings: The key ideological tensions evident in the findings pertained to those between individuality and collectivity, and freedom and necessity. Evidence indicated that the participants held a range of perspectives highlighted in the following themes: (1) ‘WRMSD, Sonographer identity, attribution and context’ which included acknowledgement, or denial, in terms of experiencing symptoms of WRMSD. (2) WRMSD and the cultural, professional, and environmental perspectives of sonographers. (3) Ideological dilemmas and WRMSD. The concept of Ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988) provided the theoretical framework on which to build the final findings and analysis chapter.
Conclusions: Participants acknowledged their role as professionals, and also their own commitment to a broader altruistic model that reinforced their identities as good healthcare professionals. The concept ‘ideological dilemmas’ provided a useful analytic framework for understanding some of the everyday feelings of sonographers towards the phenomenon of WRMSD. Further exploration of the conceptual facility thereof is recommended in future studies.