Still not safe: patient safety and the middle -managing of American medicine

Description

The rise of patient safety. Setting the stage -- Beginnings -- Rationalizing healthcare: scientific-bureaucratic medicine -- The special case of anesthesia -- Three views of "human error" -- Halting steps: early work on patient safety -- Pressure builds for reform -- The reign of patient safety. Irruption onto the world stage -- Institutionalization -- Consolidation and stagnation -- The waning of patient safety. Reflection -- The future of patient safety.;Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient-safety movement- and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization. Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem: the rise in medical litigation and physicians' aversion to risk; institutional changes in the organization and control of healthcare; and a bureaucratic movement to "rationalize" medical practice- to make a hospital run like a factory. Weaving together narratives from medicine, psychology, philosophy, and human performance, Still Not Safe offers a counterpoint to the presiding, doctor-centric narrative of contemporary American medicine.--book jacket