↓ Skip to main content

Blame the Patient, Blame the Doctor or Blame the System? A Meta-Synthesis of Qualitative Studies of Patient Safety in Primary Care

Overview of attention for article published in PLOS ONE, August 2015
Altmetric Badge

About this Attention Score

  • In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (96th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (95th percentile)

Mentioned by

news
1 news outlet
blogs
2 blogs
twitter
43 X users
facebook
1 Facebook page

Citations

dimensions_citation
68 Dimensions

Readers on

mendeley
209 Mendeley
You are seeing a free-to-access but limited selection of the activity Altmetric has collected about this research output. Click here to find out more.
Title
Blame the Patient, Blame the Doctor or Blame the System? A Meta-Synthesis of Qualitative Studies of Patient Safety in Primary Care
Published in
PLOS ONE, August 2015
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0128329
Pubmed ID
Authors

Gavin Daker-White, Rebecca Hays, Jennifer McSharry, Sally Giles, Sudeh Cheraghi-Sohi, Penny Rhodes, Caroline Sanders

Abstract

Studies of patient safety in health care have traditionally focused on hospital medicine. However, recent years have seen more research located in primary care settings which have different features compared to secondary care. This study set out to synthesize published qualitative research concerning patient safety in primary care in order to build a conceptual model. Meta-ethnography, an interpretive synthesis method whereby third order interpretations are produced that best describe the groups of findings contained in the reports of primary studies. Forty-eight studies were included as 5 discrete subsets where the findings were translated into one another: patients' perspectives of safety, staff perspectives of safety, medication safety, systems or organisational issues and the primary/secondary care interface. The studies were focused predominantly on issues seen to either improve or compromise patient safety. These issues related to the characteristics or behaviour of patients, staff or clinical systems and interactions between staff, patients and staff, or people and systems. Electronic health records, protocols and guidelines could be seen to both degrade and improve patient safety in different circumstances. A conceptual reading of the studies pointed to patient safety as a subjective feeling or judgement grounded in moral views and with potentially hidden psychological consequences affecting care processes and relationships. The main threats to safety appeared to derive from 'grand' systems issues, for example involving service accessibility, resources or working hours which may not be amenable to effective intervention by individual practices or health workers, especially in the context of a public health system. Overall, the findings underline the human elements in patient safety primary health care. The key to patient safety lies in effective face-to-face communication between patients and health care staff or between the different staff involved in the care of an individual patient. Electronic systems can compromise safety when they override the opportunities for face-to-face communication. The circumstances under which guidelines or protocols are seen to either compromise or improve patient safety needs further investigation.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 43 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 209 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United States 2 <1%
Spain 2 <1%
United Kingdom 1 <1%
France 1 <1%
Canada 1 <1%
Unknown 202 97%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 24 11%
Student > Ph. D. Student 22 11%
Student > Bachelor 20 10%
Researcher 18 9%
Student > Postgraduate 15 7%
Other 51 24%
Unknown 59 28%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 56 27%
Nursing and Health Professions 32 15%
Social Sciences 16 8%
Psychology 12 6%
Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutical Science 7 3%
Other 23 11%
Unknown 63 30%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 47. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 03 March 2019.
All research outputs
#815,998
of 23,934,148 outputs
Outputs from PLOS ONE
#11,100
of 204,429 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#10,663
of 267,233 outputs
Outputs of similar age from PLOS ONE
#288
of 6,203 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 23,934,148 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 96th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 204,429 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 15.5. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 94% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 267,233 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 6,203 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 95% of its contemporaries.