Patient safety is an important topic for policy makers, health service clinicians and managers, and researchers. One way that many organisations are trying to improve patient safety is by incident reporting but they are meeting with limited success. The question this dissertation investigates is "What are the barriers to implementing and sustaining an Electronic Adverse Incident Reporting and Recording System in an acute healthcare environment?" As part of answering that question, this dissertation develops a socio-technical systems model of those barriers. A mixed methods approach (questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews) was used to investigate the research question. By triangulating the findings from the questionnaire and interview studies, one technical barrier and three socio-barriers were identified. The technical barrier was Information and Technology, and the three socio-barriers were: 1) Attitudes and Values, 2) Training, Staffing and Skills, and 3) Leadership and Feedback. A model was then proposed which posits that the three socio-barriers interact with each other as part of the socio sub-system and that the socio sub-system interacts with the technical sub-system to form a socio-technical system. The overarching implication of the proposed model is that an NHS organization cannot just purchase a commercial Electronic Adverse Incident Reporting and Recording System and expect improvements in patient safety. The principle of joint optimization requires that changes to the socio- and / or technical sub-system be considered concurrently. The proposed model offers opportunities for future research such as investigating barriers to reporting in other national healthcare contexts and other high risk industries.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:576348 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Walsh, Kerry J. |
| Publisher | University of Strathclyde |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://oleg.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=18701 |
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