ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how considering individual and collective visualization processes may enhance sense making in health-care practice and research, particularly where invisible phenomena are involved. Personal reflections on professional practice and consideration of relevant research literature are used to develop this perspective, with particular recourse to recent work exploring visualization to help prevent and control health-care associated infections. This spans: the role of imagination; externalized visual representations of pathogens in context as developed for a health services training tool; visualizing and reflecting on clinical situations; and visual mapping of areas of research need and opportunity in a cross-disciplinary field. In this way the chapter seeks to help readers further consider visual dimensions of health humanities and how they inform sense making in context.
