Organizing Patient Safety

This book examines the organizational consequences of the recent international preoccupation with managing patient safety in the clinic. Built on presuppositions about failsafe system-design, risk elimination, and human fallibility, the patient safety programme introduces new problems and safety threats in clinical practice by devaluing practical forms of reasoning and the trained safety dispositions of clinicians. 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.

Kirstine Zinck Pedersen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

PART I.- 1. Studying patient safety: An introduction.- Chapter 2: The oral syringe case.- Chapter 3. Failsafe systems and practical reasoning.- PART II.- Chapter 4: Blame and responsibility in patient safety.- Chapter 5: The distributed risks of safety management.- Chapter 6. Learning in patient safety.- Chapter 7. Stability and change in patient safety.- PART III.- Chapter 8. A pragmatic stance on safety management.- Chapter 9. Patient safety as trained dispositions and moral education.