The need to focus on patient safety and improve the quality and consistency of medical care in acute hospital settings has been highlighted in a number of UK and international reports. When patients on a hospital ward become acutely unwell there is often a window of opportunity for staff,...

In the UK, a small private health care sector has always existed alongside the national health service (NHS). The conventional assumption is that doctors who work as salaried employees of the NHS are guided in their clinical practice by professional values which encourage them to put their...

This paper explores the meaning of higher risk status to women undergoing prenatal maternal screening for chromosomal anomalies. Quotations from lightly structured interviews and transcripts of pre-screening consultations in suburban London are used to illustrate pregnant women's diverse...

The implementation of innovative medical technologies can raise unprecedented ethical, legal and social dilemmas. This is particularly so in the area of antenatal screening, which is dominated by the language of risk and probabilities. Second trimester serum screening for Down's syndrome and...

Cross-national comparison is an important tool for health care research, but too often those who use this method fail to consider important inter-national differences in the social organisation of health care and in the relationship between health care practices and social experience. In this...

Despite the aim of nuchal translucency screening to enhance reproductive choices among prospective parents, research on the experience of those who choose to decline this screening has been fairly limited. The objective of this study is to gain an understanding of how parents who decline...

In lay terms, childbirth is regarded as a purely biological event: what is more natural than birth and death? On the other hand, social scientists have long understood that \'natural\' events are socially structured. In the case of birth, sociologists have examined the social and cultural...

Universities are increasingly regarded as key actors in the new ‘knowledge economy’, with requirements to produce market-oriented knowledge and engage in commercialization. This is of particular significance in the biomedical field, reflecting the perceived gap between success in terms of...

Continuity and advocacy are widely held to be important elements in maternal healthcare, yet they are often lacking from the care women receive. In order to understand this disparity, we draw upon interviews and ethnographic observational findings from The One-to-One Caseload Project, a study...

This research aimed to investigate the extent to which women in Southern Ghana seeking infertility treatment perceived themselves as stigmatised in order to investigate the relationship between perceived stigma and infertility-related stress. A survey was conducted using face-to-face interviews...