Date: Wednesday 28th March 2012, 12.30pm - 2.00pm

Venue: Room 506, EastGate House, 35-43 Newport Road, Cardiff CF24 0AB

Presenter: Dr Annette Lankshear

Title: Keeping up the good work? An evaluation of the Safer Patient Network.

Date: Tuesday May 1st 2012, 12.30pm-2.00pm

Venue: Room 410, EastGate House, 35-43 Newport Road, Cardiff CF24 0AB

Presenter: Sharon Mayor and Stephen Palmer

Title: Examining the context and nature of harm in healthcare

Date: Tuesday October 30th 2012, 12.30pm - 2.00pm

Venue: S25, Aberconway Building

Presenter: Anne Essain

Title: Productive Ward - Is it lean? 

Presenter: Sharon Williams

Title: Comparative study of two ward-based improvement programmes. 

Date: Thursday 25th April 2013, 12.30 -2.00pm 

Venue: Committee Room 2, Glamorgan Building

Presenter: 

Presenters: Davina Allen (Cardiff School of Nursing and Midwifery Studies) and Professor David Hughes (Department of Health and Policy Studies, Swansea University)

Title: The implications of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry

To discuss the main recommendations from the report and what the existing sociological literature (particularly from the journal Sociology of Health and Illness) tell us about care practices and regulation/governance.

 Date: Monday 20th May 2013, 12.00-2.00pm

Venue: Room 506, Eastgate House 

Presenters: Davina Allen (Cardiff School of Nursing and Midwifery Studies).

Title:Mind the Gap: The Work of Nurses in Connecting Patient Care
Background: Threats to the quality and safety of care often arise from providers’ failure to coordinate their respective contributions, such that critical interventions fall through gaps in the system.  Often referred to as the ‘glue’ in healthcare organisations, nursing has long been understood as fulfilling a role in preventing such fragmentation, but this work has never been studied in its own right.  
Objectives: This research aimed to develop a deeper understanding of this element of the nursing function, its contribution to the quality and safety of care, the knowledge and skills underpinning it and the system features that give rise to it.
Methods: Nurses’ work in connecting patient care was conceptualised as ‘articulation work’ (Strauss et al 1985).  Ethnographic methods (observations, interviews, documentary analysis) were deployed to examine the work of 43 adult nurses working in clinically focused roles purposively selected to ensure exposure to a broad spectrum of articulation work.
Results: Nurses contribute to the quality and safety of care through 6 kinds of articulation work: knowledge articulation, temporal articulation, integrative articulation, resource articulation, spatial articulation and interface articulation.  
Implications: We are very fond of talking about healthcare systems as if they were amenable to control through formal coordination mechanisms such as care pathways.  However, seen through the lens of nurses’ articulation work, it becomes clear that much of healthcare is but loosely coupled and requires a human mediator.  These findings raise questions about tight and loose coupling in healthcare work and the interventions necessary to support care coordination.

Presenter: Dr Anita Tucker, Harvard University

Details to follow