Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In Sweden, like the rest of the world, it is dangerous to become hospitalized.According to the Swedish National board of health and welfare, Socialstyrelsen, almost 10 % of patients in healthcare suffer from adverse medical events emanating within the healthcare context.Although patient safety has been often debated in healthcare, the attempts to improve the performance within the field have neither been satisfactory nor acceptable.Therefore, a new approach towards safety is needed.This approach is found to be system safety.The purpose of the thesis is to build a bridge between theory and practice by identifying how a perinatal centre can increase the level of patient safety by adopting a system view on safety.System safety entails a system approach towards safety, an approach that includes two dimensions: by shaping the working behaviour, and by managing the environmental and operational conditions.System safety is a beneficial approach in healthcare settings since the healthcare is a complex system, with complex interactions between ingoing components.The approach is of particular use in healthcare settings such as perinatal centres: where there is a high level of variation, low predictability and where adverse events might turn into fatal outcomes.The findings of how the perinatal centre perceives and works with safety show that healthcare today lacks a system approach to safety.A new way of perceiving safety needs to be based on an understanding of how accidents occur from a system point of view.This will in turn change the way to work with patient safety -by managing and monitoring i) the working behaviour and ii) the environmental and operational conditions.
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1609509588