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‘Patient satisfaction’: knowledge for ruling hospital reform — An institutional ethnography.
- Source :
-
Nursing Inquiry . Mar2003, Vol. 10 Issue 1, p57-65. 9p. - Publication Year :
- 2003
-
Abstract
- ‘Patient satisfaction’: Knowledge for ruling hospital reform — An institutional ethnography Driven by funding restraint, Canadian health-care has undergone over a decade of significant reform. Hospitals are being restructured, as text-based practices of accountability bring a new business-orientation into hospital and clinical management. New forms of knowledge, generated through records of various sorts, are a necessary resource for managing care in the new environment. This paper's research uses Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith's institutional ethnographic methodology to critically analyse one instance of text-based management. I analyse information about ‘patient satisfaction’ as it is generated through a patient survey (in which I was implicated through my involvement with a hospitalized family member). Subsequently, I have studied the management environment into which that information would be entered. I argue that in the instance analysed, the information becomes part of a dominant consumer oriented healthcare discourse that subordinates concerns about ‘what actually happened’ as a professional caregiver would have known it. On this basis, I contend that this sort of taken-for-granted approach to making decisions about quality care in hospitals may be seriously, even dangerously, flawed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- *PATIENT satisfaction
*HOSPITALS
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 13207881
- Volume :
- 10
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Nursing Inquiry
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 9243172
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00156.x