Medical Education Research of Safe Care in Radiology using IE v4.6.5
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An institutional ethnography of patient safety in clinical radiology: Understanding the work of safe care in medical imaging learning and practice
IRAS ID
262754
Contact name
Tim Dornan
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Queen's University Belfast
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 17 days
Research summary
People working in hospitals care about and help thousands daily. Sometimes people using these services suffer unintended harm that could have been avoided; at times, this leads to irreversible loss. Everyone involved is hurt, patients, their loved-ones, healthcare providers, the community and the state. Patient-safety has grown into a discipline to make healthcare safer. It matters to patients and providers alike. It is an organizational and political priority. We still find it challenging to understand it all.
Researchers investigate why harmful events happen, how we can avoid them. They commonly approach healthcare as a system, where people’s experience of learning and practising safe-care is overlooked. Policy-makers design processes to standardize patient-safety. Such one-fits-all models ignore the specifics of safe-care as people know it. For example, radiologists regularly care for patients in-directly. Learning about safe-care from actual people and their everyday experiences are important for figuring-out what goes wrong and how we can change whatever it is that goes wrong.
We will start from the people who provide and use the radiologic care within a tertiary hospital. We want to understand how regulations influence the way they learn and create safe-care. We will observe radiology providers in their everyday tasks and ask them how they translate their knowledge and policies into their work. We will discuss with patient-safety regulators and managers to find out more about making policies and putting them into action. We will ask healthcare service users, such as patient groups, what they believe safe-care should be, and how they expect regulators and providers to deliver it. We aim to learn first-hand the radiologist’s work of safe-care and to know directly from users what they need from regulators and providers. We believe this can help create approaches that harmonize better with practice and develop policies that are more intuitive.
REC name
London - City & East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
19/LO/1351
Date of REC Opinion
27 Aug 2019
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion