Organisational practices

Katarina H. Thoren is a University Adjunct at the School of Health Sciences and Social Work Vaxjo University in Sweden. She is also a PhD Candidate in social work at the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago. Her main research interest includes comparative welfare state policy, activation and labour market policy, social assistance policy and programmes and the implementation and organisational practices of social policy. She is a member of the RAPSE (Research Group on Activation Policy and Social Exclusion) at Vaxjo University. 

Each PR has been organised practically in the same way, as follows ... 

Responsibility -The extent to which personnel feel personal responsibility for patient safety and the quality of care in their organisation (questioimaires or interviews) -The extent to which personnel take initiatives to improve organisational practices or report problems to management -The percentage of investigated major adverse events... 

Investigators pay close attention to how well specified organisational practices and activities are and how closely those specifications represent and support actual practices. Specification most obviously takes the form of the established standard operating procedures of an airline or the plans prepared and followed by persormel during the course of their work. But specification also exists in niunerous other ways. These include the precise operational envelopes that are set for equipment, the work routines and customs established for coimtless manual repair... 

Investigators routinely consider how well organisational practice are specified, not only in terms of the procedures and specifications themselves, but also in terms of assessing the match, or mismatch, between what happens in practice and what is specified on paper. 

Acceptable risk resilience is, for investigators, a close approximation of their ideal of safety. It broadly represents the normal and unproblematic condition of operations being effectively and adequately protected against the potential for disruptions escalating. Many incidents are interpreted as indicating that - for the moment, at least, and in some specific area of operations - organisational practices appear to be effective and robust. These incidents are commonly referred to as being little more... 

Another way of saying this is that operational incidents are used by investigators as opportunities to re-examine, re-codify and re-engineer organisational practices incidents are used to generate affordances to reflect on and account for current organisational practices. In short, incidents are used to do epistemic work. Brief moments of organisational life are bracketed and turned into objects of collective and productive... 

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