Event Details

Every Tuesday 09.30 – 10.30, during term, we invite an academic to brief us on their research. The format is a 30 minute talk followed by discussion.

Inside Inquiries

Dr Dawn Goodwin

Increasingly, inquiries are the government’s response of choice to high-profile healthcare failures. This signals significant changes in societal responses to healthcare failures, in how we understand the causes of failures, and in how accountabilities of healthcare professionals are configured. Inquiries are a means of through which micro-, meso- and macro-level processes connect and play out; dysfunctional relationships between staff groups are projected onto national agendas, organisational failings in governance are exposed, political responses to such failures are expressed through inquiries. Inquiries are a tool reached for by patients, publics and politicians alike, yet, despite their growing influence in society, and their ever more prominent role in the regulation of healthcare, there has been relatively little sociological investigation into the processes, practices, experiences and effects of inquiries.

In this presentation I outline my ideas for further research. The subject is ripe for exploration; much of the current debate has focused on whether inquiries are effective tools for learning lessons and implementing change, and whether their cost can be justified, but beyond this narrowly framed debate, there is scant knowledge of what inquiries do, how they do it, and the effects they have on the people involved. A clearer idea of desirable futures for inquiries rests on a better understanding of what it is inquiries do and the needs they address.