Overview
- Investigates the rationalities and implications of the recent international preoccupation with patient safety in healthcare
- Pinpoints tensions and problems involved in introducing specific standardised and centralised management technologies into situated work practices
- Offers the reader an alternative vocabulary for understanding and approaching safety and risk in healthcare
Part of the book series: Health, Technology and Society (HTE)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Developing a pragmatic and more situated stance on patient safety, Pedersen offers an alternative vocabulary that refocuses attention towards the importance of conduct, habits and experience-based learning in delivering safe care. This innovative book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of organization and risk studies, health, science and technology studies and the wider social and medical sciences.
Reviews
“This is an important and timely book whose insights and approach resonate well beyond the confines of healthcare generally and patient safety specifically. Adopting and advocating a pragmatic stance towards fashionable modes of organizing and managing in the public sector and the conventional forms of critique that accompany them, Pedersen proffers a subtle and compelling argument that brilliantly combines practical rationality with ethical seriousness.” (Paul Du Gay, Royal Holloway, University of London)
“Mixing theory and detailed cases this book analyses the changing meanings and organizational configurations of patient safety. Pedersen shows how the entanglement of zero-risk accountability requirements, system fantasies, and technologies of patient risk management, continuously produce unintended consequences. As a corrective she proposes a pragmatic and learning-based approach to patient safety drawing on the work of Dewey. Organizing Patient Safety will be of great interest to a wide variety of scholars working in organization and risk studies, as well to health policy makers.” (Michael Power, London School of Economics and Political Science)
“A well-posed problem, paraphrasing Bergson, is far better than a solution provided on the backdrop of badly posed problem. This book resists the natural urge to focus on a solution when confronted with the problem of patient safety. Instead Kirstine Zinck Pedersen provides a thorough, in-depth analysis of the problems in a time where everybody is in haste to solve them, and by implication she provides a sensitive way forward. Interestingly, she does not only criticize the presumptions that are at the basis of the dominant patient safety policies, but also the available alternatives as reproducing the dichotomies from the other end of the spectrum. Instead Pedersen provides an alternative that goes beyond the binary. Moreover, her focus is not on the effect of safety programs on patients but for the health care professionals. This excellent book opens a window in your head: Enjoy the view!” (Jessica Mesman, Maastricht University)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Organizing Patient Safety
Book Subtitle: Failsafe Fantasies and Pragmatic Practices
Authors: Kirstine Zinck Pedersen
Series Title: Health, Technology and Society
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53786-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-53785-0Published: 13 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-71127-7Published: 23 December 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-53786-7Published: 30 October 2017
Series ISSN: 2946-3386
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3378
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXIII, 279
Topics: Medical Sociology, Health Care Management, Ethics, Health Administration