The role of professional communities in governing patient safety

PURPOSE: Using the example of medication safety, this paper aims to explore the impact of three managerial interventions (adverse incident reporting, ward-level support by pharmacists, and a medication safety subcommittee) on different professional communities situated in the English National Health Service (NHS).

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with clinical and managerial staff from two English NHS acute trusts, supplemented with meeting observations and documentary analysis.

FINDINGS: Attitudes toward managerial intervention differ by professional community (between doctors, nurses and pharmacists) according to their existing norms of safety and perceptions of formal governance processes.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The heterogeneity of social norms across different professional communities and medical specialties has implications for the design of organisational learning mechanisms in the field of patient safety.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The paper shows that theorisation of professional "resistance" to managerialism privileges the study of doctors' reactions to management with the consequent neglect of the perceptions of other professional communities.