 The role of dynamic trade-offs in creating safety—A qualitative study of handover across care boundaries in emergency careMark Sujan, Peter Spurgeon and Matthew Cooke Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2015, vol. 141, issue C, 54-62 Abstract: The paper aims to demonstrate how the study of everyday clinical work can contribute novel insights into a common and stubborn patient safety problem—the vulnerabilities of handover across care boundaries in emergency care. Based on a dialectical interpretation of the empirical evidence gathered in five National Health Service organisations, the paper argues that performance variability is an essential component in the delivery of safe care, as practitioners translate tensions they encounter in their everyday work into safe practices through dynamic trade-offs based on their experience and the requirements of the specific situation. The findings may shed new light on the vulnerabilities of the handover process, and they might help explain why improvements to handover have remained largely elusive and what type of future recommendations may be appropriate for improving patient safety. Keywords: Resilience; Patient safety; Emergency care; Handover; Healthcare; Dialectics (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:141:y:2015:i:c:p:54-62 DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2015.03.006 Access Statistics for this article Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier |
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