Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search

Open Access padlockePrints

Financialising acute kidney injury: From the practices of care to the numbers of improvement

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Dean PieridesORCiD

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.


Abstract

Although sociological studies of quality and safety have identified competing epistemologies in the attempt to measure and improve care, there are gaps in our understanding of how finance and accounting practices are being used to organise this field. This analysis draws on what others have elsewhere called ‘financialisation’ in order to explore the quantification of qualitatively complex care practices. We make our argument using ethnographic data of a quality improvement programme for acute kidney injury (AKI) in a publicly funded hospital in England. Our study is thus concerned with tracing the effects of financialisation in the emergence and assembly of AKI as an object of concern within the hospital. We describe three linked mechanisms through which this occurs: (1) representing and intervening in kidney care; (2) making caring practices count and (3) decision-making using kidney numbers. Together these stages transform care practices first into risks and then from risks into costs. We argue that this calculative process reinforces a separation between practice and organisational decision-making made on the basis of numbers. This elevates the status of numbers while diminishing the work of practitioners and managers. We conclude by signalling possible future avenues of research that can take up these processes.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Bailey S, Pierides D, Brisley A, Weisshaar C, Blakeman T

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Sociology of Health and Illness

Year: 2019

Volume: 41

Issue: 5

Pages: 882-899

Print publication date: 30/06/2019

Online publication date: 12/02/2019

Acceptance date: 14/11/2018

ISSN (print): 0141-9889

ISSN (electronic): 1467-9566

Publisher: Wiley

URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12868

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.12868


Altmetrics

Altmetrics provided by Altmetric


Share