'But why is that better?'
‘But why is that better?’ An investigation of what applied philosophy and ethics can bring to quality improvement work in healthcare is a research project funded by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award in Humanities and Social Science. The project runs for five years, from 2018–2023.
Quality improvement (QI) aims to tackle the shortcomings of health services, but QI initiatives do not always work and sometimes create new problems. One of the reasons for these failures is that people do not agree about what counts as good quality, and quality is often interpreted in ways that fail to capture the aspects of healthcare that matter to people.
This project uses the tools of applied philosophy to help deliver on the promise, and avoid the pitfalls, of healthcare QI. We think that applied philosophy can help elucidate and address the conceptual, ethical and practical challenges faced by researchers and quality improvement practitioners, with potentially transformative implications.
Read more about our activity including conferences, workshops, talks and publications by clicking on the 'Activity' tab below
Aims
We will work with QI partners from diverse healthcare settings to address debates about quality and to understand how the potential harms and ethical challenges produced by QI can be better managed. We will pioneer a partnership approach to building applied philosophy into QI.
Methods
We will address these goals by integrating our applied philosophical scholarship with literature-based work; interviews with QI leaders; partnership working with QI sites; knowledge exchange events; and methodological innovation and reflection.
Project team
| Professor Alan Cribb |
Principal Investigator |
School of Education, Communication and Society, King’s College London |
| Professor Vikki Entwistle |
Co-Investigator |
Health Services Research Unit and School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen |
| Dr Polly Mitchell | Research Fellow | School of Education, Communication and Society, King’s College London |
Advisory group
| Name | Affiliations |
| Professor Natalie Armstrong |
Department of Health Sciences, University of Leicester |
| Mr Jono Broad | Quality Improvement Patient Involvement (QIπ) |
| Dr Sibylle Erdmann | Ei SMART BMJ Patient Panel and parent carer to two children with healthcare needs |
| Professor Soren Holm | Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, University of Manchester; Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, University of Manchester |
| Professor Christian Munthe | Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenberg |
| Professor Craig Ramsay |
Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen |
| Professor Rosamund Scott | Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, King’s College London |
| Professor Nick Sevdalis |
Centre for Implementation sciences, King’s College London; NHS National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) South London |
| Professor Justin Waring | Centre for Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning, Nottingham University Business School |
| Professor James Wilson | Department of Philosophy, University College London; Health Humanities Centre, University College London |
Principal Investigator
Professor of Bioethics and Education
Investigator
Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Bioethics and Public Policy
Affiliations
Funding
Funding Body: Wellcome Trust
Amount: £721,710
Period: December 2018 - December 2023