Abstract
This article presents an overview of contemporary research into patient safety. The article suggests that patient safety research to date has tended to privilege the formal and structural dimensions of safety at the expense of the social and affective dimensions of safety. The article previews the research articles brought together in this special issue of Social Science & Medicine, paying particular attention to the impact of these studies on the field of patient safety research generally. The present article summarises this impact in the form of the following three patient safety research principles. First, to account for whether and how safe and improvement-oriented practice is achieved, research must engage with both the predictability and the complexity of the sites and processes it seeks to describe, explain and/or impact on. Second, engaging with complexity implicates researchers in experiencing it, and this implicates the research process and its methodology in a process of sense-making of the practical and affective consequences for and with practitioners inhabiting and enacting that complexity. Third, besides numerically-based descriptions, abstracted explanations and procedural prescriptions, patient safety research evidence must encompass experiential data, collaboratively-produced accounts and/or experience-based designs.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.