Nicola Mackintosh

Nicola Mackintosh is a Research Associate in the Innovations Programme, NIHR King’s Patient Safety & Service Quality Research Centre. Prior to joining King’s College, London in February 2008, Nicola spent 5 years as a Research Fellow at both Brighton University and City University.  At Brighton she worked in a team undertaking a Department of Health funded national evaluation of 4 collaborations piloting interprofessional education. At City, she was involved in several patient safety related projects examining the role of human factors in maternity and emergency care. Her work included a methodological study comparing survey-based and observation-based evaluations of organisational and safety cultures together with markers of the quality of care.

Nicola’s background includes critical care nursing and lecturing in Health Promotion and Interpersonal Skills. Her research at PSSQ explores the management of complications in intra-partum and acute care (http://www.kingspssq.org.uk/programmes/innovations/failure-to-rescue-problems-and-solutions/). She is using a qualitative methodology including ethnographic observations and interviews to explore the relationship between certain safety strategies and tools and the socio-cultural and institutional context of work. Importantly, interviews also draw on the patient’s voice in addition to professional perspectives to establish the role of the user in speaking up and contributing to their own safety during episodes of escalation of care. Nicola is also undertaking a PhD part time looking at medical response to the acutely ill patient within medical wards, focusing particularly on the construction of ‘deterioration’ and ‘rescue’.

Research interests:

• Acute care, women health
• Role of users in speaking up and promoting their own safety
• Boundary issues around trajectories of care
• Role of social studies of science and social science approaches in helping us understand co-constructed relationships between safety technologies and the organisation of work
• Ethnographies of health care work
• Organisational narratives and their role in illuminating understandings of contested politics of acute and maternity care