Figure 2.

Process map of the complexities, and interacting elements of a patient journey through the acute medical unit, showing the qualitative codes in blue, the themes in green and the overarching metathemes in red. Themes and metathemes are shown to overlap as ‘Metathemes’ is a term describing themes that are overarching and cross-cutting (i.e. intersecting with each other) in the data. For example, ‘Lack of active decision making and communication between teams’ is a specific theme which interacts with (i.e. both results from and exacerbates). ‘Lack of care coordination between health professionals and different teams, lack of knowledge of who is in charge’, while the latter is also resulting from and exacerbated by other themes such as patient monitoring = not done or acted on, and indeed codes such as reliance on the most junior members of staff attending to patients first.