Making Health Care Safer - Summary

I only summarized the main plenary sessions so far but the conference had so much more to offer - lots of interesting posters and several very interesting talks in the parallel sessions. A big well done to the organizers for assembling such an interesting program.

I think what I take away from the conference are a couple of main themes:

• context-dependency - this was raised over and over again, one size fits all just don't work but more importantly what works in one place might not necessarily work in another. Is decentralization key to addressing this? But how can we then ensure quality and uniform standards?
• emotion - Justin Waring mentioned this and I also came across it in my reseach. Health care services are dealing with people and people are not (always) rational. Surprise, optimism, fear or anger are all strong emotions which will influence how people react in certain situations. So far this has not been addressed at all.
• complexity
• knowledge
• organisational hurdles

The amazing thing is that these are themes which also surfaced in my own work - thus I seem to be on the right track. Makes me a bit more optimistic (speaking of emotions) about my viva :)