Abstract
Under headlines such as human factors, ‘non-blame’ and systems thinking, mainstream patient safety thinking and practice is, on the one hand, made up of a number of dominating presuppositions about human nature, risk and organizational reality, and, on the other, concrete technologies for incident reporting, error handling and risk reduction. In this introduction, Pedersen presents her study of this international policy programme and its meeting with clinical practice. The chapter includes a description of alternative strategies for studying safety, the Danish case study on which the book is based and the ‘pragmatic stance’ of the book: a commitment to the empirical field and the problem at hand which involves problem orientation, attention to the pragmatic method of inquiry and a steady focus on practical reasoning and the actual clinical situation.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Danish hospitals are governed by five national regions, while 98 Danish municipalities run the primary care.
- 4.
- 5.
The Danish patient safety policy programme is only one of several parallel systems for the governance of medical errors in Danish healthcare, which also comprises systems for patients’ rights and complaints, supervisory functions and patient insurance and compensation. Of these functions, the publicly funded compensation scheme is run by the Danish Patient Compensation Association separately from the complaints system. As for the remaining functions they have been merged since 2011 and in the fall of 2015 the Danish Patient Safety Authority was formed to administer incident reporting, the patient complaints system and the supervisory authorities.
- 6.
See the Law on Health, Act No. 288 of 15/04/2009.
- 7.
The Danish Institute for Health Services Research (DSI), now part of The Danish Institute for Local and Regional Government Research (KORA), co-financed my PhD project, which has laid the groundwork for this book. As part of this arrangement, I conducted a pilot study for The Danish Society for Patient Safety of ‘adverse events’ in elderly care units (see Jensen and Pedersen 2010).
- 8.
In total, the ethnographic material for this book comprises a total of around 300 hours of observation and interviews with 28 people. All quotes from the fieldwork are translated from Danish.
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Pedersen, K.Z. (2018). Studying Patient Safety: An Introduction. In: Organizing Patient Safety. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53786-7_1
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