Enacting corporate governance of health care safety and quality : a dramaturgy of hospital boards in England
Date
02/02/2016Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The governance of patient safety is a challenging concern for all health systems. Yet, while the role of executive boards receives increased scrutiny, the area remains theoretically and methodologically underdeveloped. Specifically, we lack a detailed understanding of the performative aspects at play: what board members say and do to discharge their accountabilities for patient safety. This article draws on qualitative data from overt non-participant observation of four NHS hospital Foundation Trust boards in England. Applying a dramaturgical framework to explore scripting, setting, staging and performance, we found important differences between case study sites in the performative dimensions of processing and interpretation of infection control data. We detail the practices associated with these differences - the legitimation of current performance, the querying of data classification, and the naming and shaming of executives – to consider their implications.
Citation
Freeman , T , Millar , R , Mannion , R & Davies , H 2016 , ' Enacting corporate governance of health care safety and quality : a dramaturgy of hospital boards in England ' , Sociology of Health and Illness , vol. 38 , no. 2 , pp. 233-251 . https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12309
Publication
Sociology of Health and Illness
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0141-9889Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Description
The research was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Services and Delivery Research (HS&DR) programme (grant no. 10/1007/02; project title ‘Effective board governance of safe care’; co-applicants R. Mannion, T. Freeman and HTO Davies).Collections
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