This book is open access and will be available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Based on ethnographic research within hospitals across England and Wales over a four-year period, this book provides a detailed and unflinching examination of the world of the hospital ward and the everyday cultures of ward life; the organisation, routines and patterns of bedside care within it; and its consequences for patients and staff. Katie Featherstone and Andy Northcott offer a major new addition to the tradition of hospital ethnography.

Featherstone and Northcott explore a key contemporary transformation in our hospitals, the experiences, impacts, and consequences, of an increasing significant population of people living with dementia who require unscheduled acute hospital care. This book (supported by the National Institute for Health Research) contributes to our understandings of cultures of care, the practical recognition and attribution of dementia, understandings of ageing and the erosion of the person and the body, and the classification of the mind and behaviour within the contemporary institution.