Judith Allsop

Maintaining professional identity : doctors' responses to complaints

This paper reports on the findings of three empirical studies, conducted by the authors, of how doctors respond to complaints about medical care. The authors found that doctors respond to complaints with a range of negative emotions, and interpreted complaints as a challenge to their competence and expertise as professionals, not as issues troubling the complainant or as legitimate grievances. The interview data show that the way in which doctors talked about complaints and accounted for them drew on their understandings of their work world. They suggest that this helped them maintain a sense of control, and argue that this not only sustains individual security but also reinforces professional identity and serves the interests of professional politics. However, they conclude that this reaction to complaints goes against the spirit of resolving complaints to the satisfaction of the complainant which is currently the aim of systems for quality assurance.

Influencing the national policy process: the role of health consumer groups.

Introduction  Whilst recent research has focused on consumer involvement at local level in the UK, there have been few studies of the representation of user, carer and patients’ interests nationally. This paper concentrates on the role of health consumer groups in representing the collective interests of patients, users and carers in the national policy process.

Professional self-regulation in a changing architecture of governance: comparing health policy in the UK and Germany

This chapter compares transformations in professional self-regulation in the UK and Germany through the lens of governance. We introduce an expanded concept of governance that includes national configurations of state–profession relationships and places selfregulation in the context of other forms of governance. The analysis shows that a general trend towards network governance plays out differently. In the UK, a plural structure of network governance and stakeholder arrangements is emerging in the context of stateled change. In Germany, partnership governance between sickness funds and medical associations shape the transformations and act as a barrier towards the entry of new players.