Abstract
Serious attention has been given to safety in many high-risk domains in Japan and elsewhere. Healthcare has been relatively slow to respond to the development of safety science. However, in many countries attempts have been made since the 1990s to reform the regulation of risks to patients, and Japan is no exception. Nationally, the Japan Council for Quality Health Care (JQ) manages the web-based reporting system and collects data about serious adverse events and incidents on a voluntary basis. This chapter compares how hospitals in Japan and England use their respective reporting systems as a source of learning, and highlights the importance of sociocultural and institutional contexts when examining socio-technical settings in healthcare. While this study was modelled upon that previously carried out in England, the scope of this chapter is broader, and targeted at country-level comparison. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with patient safety managers in three different types of hospitals in Japan (Dec 2016–Jun 2018) and experts in four European countries (Jan–Dec 2017). Our findings from the various frameworks and the patient safety managers’ perceptions suggest that web-based reporting has become an important tool, but human-to-human interactions and national policy contexts remain critical for understanding incident reporting and patient safety.
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List of Interviews
Japan
AC (Interview ID), Safety Manager in an acute care hospital, 10 January 2017.
MH (Interview ID), Safety Manager in a mental health hospital, 26 December 2016.
TH (Interview ID), Director of Patient Safety Office in a teaching hospital, 22 June 2018.
JP (Interview ID), Representative, national incident-reporting centre, 22 June 2018.
Denmark
DK1 (Interview ID), Representative, non-governmental body for the promotion of patient safety, 5 July 2017.
DK2 (Interview ID), Representative, national incident-reporting centre, 7 July 2017.
DK3 (Interview ID), Researcher in patient safety, 30 August 2017.
Germany
DE1 (Interview ID), Safety Manager, university hospital, 21 July 2017.
DE2 (Interview ID), Manager, region-based incident-reporting centre, 11 September 2017.
Ireland
IE1 (Interview ID), Government official in charge of patient safety policy, 25 January 2017.
IE2 (Interview ID), Researcher in patient safety, 20 February 2017.
IE3 (Interview ID), Representative, state-funded regulator in charge of quality and standards of care, 15 March 2017.
IE4 (Interview ID), Representative, state-funded regulator in charge of incident reporting, 12 May 2017.
The Netherlands
NE1 (Interview ID), Representative, third-party national regulator in charge of patient safety and incident data, 1 March 2017.
NE2 (Interview ID), Researcher in patient safety, 16 March 2017.
NE3 (Interview ID), Safety Manager/doctor in university hospital, 15 September 2017.
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Kodate, N., Taneda, K., Yumoto, A., Sugiyama, Y. (2021). The Role of Incident-Reporting Systems in Improving Patient Safety in Japanese Hospitals: A Comparative Perspective. In: Brucksch, S., Sasaki, K. (eds) Humans and Devices in Medical Contexts. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6280-2_7
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