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Improving patient safety in two French hospitals: why teamwork training is not enough

Odessa Petit dit Dariel (Institut du Management, EHESP, Paris, France)
Paula Cristofalo (Institut du Management, EHESP, Paris, France)

Journal of Health Organization and Management

ISSN: 1477-7266

Article publication date: 1 August 2020

Issue publication date: 15 September 2020

327

Abstract

Purpose

The persistent challenges that healthcare organizations face as they strive to keep patients safe attests to a need for continued attention. To contribute to better understanding the issues currently defying patient safety initiatives, this paper reports on a study examining the aftermath of implementing a national team training program in two hospital units in France.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were drawn from a longitudinal qualitative study analyzing the implementation of a French patient safety program aimed at improving teamwork in hospitals. Data collection took place over a four-year period (2015–2019) in two urban hospitals in France and included multiple interviews with 31 participants and 150 h of observations.

Findings

Despite explicit efforts to improve inter-professional teamwork, three main obstacles interfered with healthcare professionals' attempts at safeguarding patients: perspectival variations in what constituted “patient safety”, a paradoxical injunction to do more with less and conflicting organizational priorities.

Originality/value

This paper exposes patient safety as misleadingly consensual and identifies a lack of alignment between stakeholders in the complex system that is a hospital. This ultimately interferes with patient safety objectives and highlights that even well-equipped, frontline actors cannot achieve long-term results without more systemic organizational changes.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewer and the editor for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Citation

Petit dit Dariel, O. and Cristofalo, P. (2020), "Improving patient safety in two French hospitals: why teamwork training is not enough", Journal of Health Organization and Management, Vol. 34 No. 6, pp. 639-653. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHOM-02-2020-0045

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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