Risking safety or safely risking? Healthcare professionals' understanding of risk-taking in everyday work

Abstract

Current patient safety orthodoxy in the United Kingdom and beyond has tended to treat risk as something that should be assessed and estimated quantitatively. While this offers benefits to research and practice, there are added benefits from paying closer scrutiny to the underlying causes that influence such adverse events in healthcare. In this article, risk is seen as something subjective, or rather as part of the “lived experiences” of healthcare professionals. Results from this study indicate that the vast majority of healthcare professionals we interviewed understand risk as something intrinsic to healthcare; another variable one needs to prepare for. Risks were generally described in terms of acceptable versus unacceptable and avoidable versus unavoidable. In terms of identifying and dealing with risk, we found indications that the decision-making processes healthcare professionals use vary according to their training and experience. We suggest that the further examination of the apparent differences that exist in the perceptual awareness of risk can advance our knowledge on the possible impact they could have upon patient safety in the wider spectrum.

Keywords:

• patient safety
• risk
• teamwork
• communication
• workplace