BACKGROUND: This study investigates the situated organization in a workplace producing intensive care, that is an intensive care unit (ICU). The workplace research tradition concerns work and interaction/communication in technology-intensive environments. Communication is seen as social action and cannot be separated from production or from the context in which the activities are situated. AIM: The aim of the present study was to explore how intensive care is produced by analysing a recurrent situated activity in the ICU, namely the delivery and reception of a patient coming from the operation unit. METHOD: In the fieldwork, participant observations was used to study everyday practice in an ICU, combined with written field notes. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION: Intensive care is to a great extent produced through routine practices. The division of labour is marked and is taken for granted: everyone knows what to do. The actors' physical location in the room is connected to their functions and work with supportive tools. Verbal reports, visual displays and activities make the information transmission available to everyone in the patient room. Shared understanding of the situation seems to make words redundant when the activities of competent actors are co-ordinated. There is also coordination between the actors in the ICU and the technological equipment, which constantly produces new information that must be interpreted. Enrolled Nurses are physically closest to the patients, the physician is the one most physically distant from patients and Registered Nurses bridge the gap between them. These actors produce and re-produce intensive care through constant sense-making in the here and now at the same time as the past is present in their activities.

BACKGROUND: The present study focuses on human-machine interaction in an intensive care unit in the West of Sweden. AIMS: The aim of the present study was to explore how technology intervenes and challenges the ICU staff's knowing in practice. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE: The study's theoretical starting point draws on workplace research tradition. Workplace studies encompass the interaction between the actors' situated activities and the technological tools that make their activities possible. METHOD: Fieldwork or in situ studies of everyday practice in an intensive care unit documented in written field notes constituted the data. RESULTS: The findings show first how technology intervenes in the division of labour when the taken-for-granted "old" everyday practice is disrupted when a new machine intervenes in the morning's work; secondly, it reveal how technology challenges practical knowing and thirdly, it shows how technology reformulates practice. Staff members' awareness of routine problems is often connected to the ability to see, which is always related to cultural/contextual competence. CONCLUSION: It is concluded that it is not talk alone that helps the caregivers to "(dis)solve" the problems. The ability to see the problems, the work environment and to find the relevant supporting tools for "(dis)solving" the routine problems is also crucial. But it is not possible to say that it is the skillful work of humans that solve problems, nor do we claim it is the tools that do so. Humans and tools are interwoven in the problem-solving process. Relevance to clinical practice. Routine problems in the intensive care unit are not "(dis)solved" through the cognitive work of individual staff members alone. Problems are also "(dis)solved" jointly with other staff members. Staff members "borrow" the knowing from each other and problems are re-represented through communication. The knowing has to be distributed among the intensive care unit staff to make the everyday work flexible.