The social construction of care pathways: a nursing management initiative towards operationalising continuous quality improvement in a Children's hospital

The literature is dominated by prescriptive accounts of the application of Continuous Quality Improvement and care pathways in the acute hospital services sector. The authors assume that the organisation is a designed artefact (Scapens, Otley and Lister, 1984): goals can be achieved. This thesisr eports on the nature, processa nd consequenceso f a Nurse Manager introducing care pathways in a Children's Hospital It believes, in opposition to the conventional view, that the organisation is a culture. The actions and interactions of individuals and groups shape initiatives. This is within context and within time. The research investigation was conducted over a twenty-five month period, from February 1996 to April 1998. It was ethnographic in nature. Interviews were conducted with managers, nurses and doctors, formal meetings and activity in the Children's Emergency Department observed, and documentation collected. The findings are, however, presented from the nurses' perspective using their words. Files for newspaper clippings were created and maintained. The thesis contributes to the literature in three ways. In the main, it represents the first contextual and critical account of the implementation of care pathways than that believed to be contained in the literature. Further, it purposefully utilises for the first time two conceptualf rameworks in order to explicate the changep rocessesin the Children's Hospital. These are Watson's (1994) Strategic Exchange Perspective and Dawson's (1994) Processual Framework. It presents the descriptive part of the findings in the form of a narrative. The Nurse Manager established a project to multiskill experienced nurses in the diagnosis and treatment of minor conditions using care pathways as the vehicle. Her role changed during the process of implementation, but the project had little, if no, impact on power structures between and decision making of doctors and nurses