 Social scientists and patient safety: Critics or contributors?Charles Vincent Social Science & Medicine, 2009, vol. 69, issue 12, 1777-1779 Abstract: Patient safety has been high on the national and international agenda in healthcare for almost a decade. It is proving to be a tough problem; tough in cultural, technical, clinical, and psychological terms and because of its massive scale and heterogeneity. While many of the challenges and problems of patient safety are social and organisational, few social scientists are involved in patient safety. Clinicians and clinical researchers are for the most part open to other perspectives, but that they may not fully appreciate the potential contribution of the social sciences. Social scientists can, for instance, assist in drawing attention to the need to take an account of the social and cultural context of patient safety interventions, by drawing on narratives and stories to illuminate organisational processes and by encouraging greater use of ethnographic and observational research. However, if social scientists are to have a real impact they need to do more than simply offer critiques of patient safety and move to active engagement with clinicians and patient safety researchers. Keywords: Patient; safety; Biomedicine; Clinicians; Social; science; Social; scientists (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:socmed:v:69:y:2009:i:12:p:1777-1779 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.