This mini-pilot served to confirm that in-person, visual-based methods which approached the issue more variously (and even tangentially) might be more productive. In this regard, Harrow et al. (2008) provide a very useful starting point. Their study used one-to-one interviews followed by an invitation to use a toolkit consisting of a range of art materials in order that the 15 participating women might each produce a visual representation of their mental images of their breast cancer. The reported success of this strategy encouraged us to believe that a broadly similar approach might be used to address the challenge of eliciting the mind’s eye view of pathogens in HAI prevention and control. There is, however, a key difference that distinguished our enquiry from the study of Harrow et al. That is, we were focusing on HAI pathogens primarily as invisible phenomena in their external context outwith the body, i.e. pathogen reservoirs within a clinical setting.