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Abstract
The increasing focus on patient safety in the field of health policy is accompanied
by research programs that articulate the role of the social sciences as one of contributing
to enhancing safety in healthcare. Through these programs, new approaches to studying
safety are facing a narrow definition of 'usefulness' in which researchers are to
discover the factors that support or hamper the implementation of existing policy
agendas. This is unfortunate since such claims for useful involvement in predefined
policy agendas may undo one of the strongest assets of good social science research:
the capacity to complexify the taken-for-granted conceptualizations of the object
of study. As an alternative to this definition of 'usefulness', this article proposes
a focus on multiple ontologies in the making when studying patient safety. Through
such a focus, the role of social scientists becomes the involvement in refiguring
the problem space of patient safety, the relations between research subjects and objects,
and the existing policy agendas. This role gives medical sociologists the opportunity
to focus on the question of which practices of 'effective care' are being enacted
through different approaches for dealing with patient safety and what their consequences
are for the care practices under study. In order to explore these questions, this
article draws on empirical material from an ongoing evaluation of a large quality
improvement collaborative for the care sectors in the Netherlands. It addresses how
issues like 'effectiveness' and 'client participation' are at present articulated
in this collaborative and shows that alternative figurations of these notions dissolve
many 'implementation problems' presently experienced. Further it analyzes how such
a focus of medical sociology on multiple ontologies engenders new potential for exploring
particular spaces for 'acting with' quality improvement agents.