Authors' objectives: Health care scandals, such as the most recent at Mid Staffordshire, have demonstrated that uncaring and ineffective practices can flourish in hospitals when the organisational context goes wrong. When this happens, patients not only have unpleasant experiences during care but they can be hurt or even die as a consequence. In such situations it is important that staff feel that they can raise concerns or blow the whistle when they see poor quality or unsafe care. All NHS organisations are required by law to have policies in place to help support employees to raise such concerns, but recent hospital scandals and the findings of numerous staff surveys have shown that, for a variety of reasons, many staff feel inhibited in raising concerns, and even when they do, that NHS organisations often fail to act at all or respond inappropriately. This research seeks to explore this in more depth, with the goal of providing evidence-informed practical guidance for the design and implementation of effective whistleblowing policies in the NHS.

Project Status: Completed

URL for project: http://www.nets.nihr.ac.uk/projects/hsdr/140433

Year Published: 2018

URL for published report: http://www.nets.nihr.ac.uk/projects/hsdr/140433

English language abstract: An English language summary is available

Publication Type: Not Assigned

Country: England, United Kingdom

Organisation Name: NIHR Health Services and Delivery Research programme

Contact Address: NIHR Journals Library, National Institute for Health and Care Research, Evaluation, Trials and Studies Coordinating Centre, Alpha House, University of Southampton Science Park, Southampton SO16 7NS, UK

Contact Name: journals.library@nihr.ac.uk

Contact Email: journals.library@nihr.ac.uk

Copyright: Queen's Printer and Controller of HMSO