On doing ‘risk work’ in the context of successful outcomes
Exploring how medication safety is brought into action through health professionals’ everyday working practices
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20511307 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Albert Farré (0000-0002-1681-0441, University of Birmingham, corresponding author), Karen Shaw (0000-0001-7120-8595, University of Birmingham), Gemma Heath (0000-0002-1569-5576, Aston University), Carole Cummins (0000-0001-5464-1944, University of Birmingham) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages | 209-225 |
| Publication date | 2017-05-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Health Risk & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-8575 • E-ISSN: 1469-8331 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13698575.2017.1336512 |
| OpenAlex | W2625777437 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 33 |
Interest in risk has grown exponentially in healthcare, resulting in a plethora of policies and guidelines to manage risk at all levels across the healthcare system. However, the impact of risk on the nature and experiences of healthcare work remains a relatively neglected area of research on risk in healthcare. Building on the concept of ‘risk work’, in this article we examine how medication safety is brought into action through health professionals’ everyday working practices at the point of medication administration. Drawing on two closely related data sets, both generated in a large paediatric hospital providing secondary and tertiary care in England, we argue that medication-related risks are constructed and negotiated through situated social interactions. Frontline practitioners actively reconcile the logics of risk work and good-quality bedside patient care enabling them to get risk work done to successfully meet the formally established standards of quality and safety performance. ‘Risk work’ has the potential to make visible and explicit a range of risk-related practices that may not be acknowledged as such if they do not align with the established meanings of risk and the normative frameworks built around them. A focus on ‘risk work’ can bring in a new lens to the study of risk in healthcare with the potential to generate learning from how risk work gets done in the context of routine clinical practice and successful outcomes, rather than incidents and failures, in healthcare service provision
Business · Health care · Normative · Patient safety · Political science · Public relations · Risk assessment · Risk management · Situated · Engineering · Healthcare cost, quality, practices · Healthcare Quality and Management · Medical Malpractice and Liability Issues · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology
Purity and Danger
Human error
Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability
May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View of the Expert–Lay Knowledge Divide
Case Study Research
The art of case study research
Clinical governance and governmentality
The institutional origins of risk
On ‘risk work’
Accounting for failure
Conflicting knowledges on risk
Heading into the unknown
Risk and Everyday Life
Towards a sociology of risk work
The institutional work of hospital risk managers
Informal logics of risk
Risk and Blame
The struggle to improve patient care in the face of professional boundaries
The Constant Comparative Method of Qualitative Analysis
Technological affordances of risk and blame
Risk, governance and the experience of care
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |