Impacts of Operational Failures on Primary Care Physicians' Work: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of the Literature.
Publication Date
2020-03Journal Title
Annals of family medicine
ISSN
1544-1709
Publisher
HighWire
Volume
18
Issue
2
Pages
159-168
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Physical Medium
Print
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Sinnott, C., Georgiadis, A., Park, J., & Dixon-Woods, M. (2020). Impacts of Operational Failures on Primary Care Physicians' Work: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of the Literature.. Annals of family medicine, 18 (2), 159-168. https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.2485
Abstract
Purpose
Operational failures are system-level errors in the supply of information, equipment and materials to healthcare personnel. We aimed to review and synthesize the research literature to determine how operational failures in primary care affect the work of primary care physicians.
Methods
We conducted a Critical Interpretive Synthesis. We searched seven databases for papers published in English from database inception until October 2017 for primary research of any design that addressed problems interfering with primary care physicians’ work. All potentially eligible titles/abstracts were screened by one reviewer; 30% were subject to second screening. We conducted an iterative critique, analysis and synthesis of included studies.
Results
Our search retrieved 8544 unique citations. Though no paper explicitly referred to “operational failures”, we identified 95 papers that conformed to our general definition. The included studies show a gap between what physicians perceived they should be doing and what they were doing, which was strongly linked to operational failures – including those relating to technology, information, and coordination – over which physicians often had limited control. Operational failures actively configured physicians’ work by requiring significant compensatory labor to deliver the goals of care. This labor was typically unaccounted for in scheduling or reward systems and had adverse consequences for physician and patient experience.
Conclusions
Primary care physicians’ efforts to compensate for suboptimal work systems are often concealed, risking an incomplete picture of the work they do and problems they routinely face. Future research must identify which operational failures are highest impact and tractable to improvement.
Sponsorship
This work has been supported by an NIHR (UK) Clinical Lectureship, an Academy for Medical Sciences (UK) Starter Grant (SGL018\1023) and Mary Dixon-Woods’ Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award (WT09789). MDW is supported by the Health Foundation's grant to the University of Cambridge for The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute.
Funder references
Wellcome Trust (097899/Z/11/Z)
Health Foundation (unknown)
Department of Health (via National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)) (NF-SI-0617-10026)
Embargo Lift Date
2100-01-01
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.2485
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/294876
Rights
All rights reserved