A qualitative study of speaking out about patient safety concerns in intensive care units (November 2017)

Summary

Much policy focus has been afforded to the role of 'whistleblowers' in raising concerns about quality and safety of patient care in healthcare settings. However, most opportunities for personnel to identify and act on these concerns are likely to occur much further upstream, in the day-to-day mundane interactions of everyday work. Using qualitative data from over 900 hours of ethnographic observation and 98 interviews across 19 English intensive care units (ICUs), the authors of this paper, published in Social Science & Medicine, studied how personnel gave voice to concerns about patient safety or poor practice.