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About University of Galway
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Accessibility & LanguageWhistleblowing and Healthcare
Healthcare remains one of the most prevalent sectors for whistleblowing disclosures internationally, with staff reporting obstacles to speaking up safely about wrongdoing. In our research, we examine accountability and resilience in healthcare whistleblowing systems, focusing on workers' experiences.
Whistleblowing – Towards an Ethically Sustainable and Resilient Healthcare with Systems Thinking (WHISTLERS)
Ongoing project
This two-year research project is funded by SyMeCo, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc fellowship programme at Lero – the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, led by postdoc researcher Johanna Wiisak together with Professor Kate Kenny at the J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics, University of Galway (1st November 2024 to 31st October 2026). During this project we will analyse whistleblowing, resilience engineering and whistleblowing technology at micro (individual) and meso (team and organization) levels in healthcare from the perspective of healthcare professionals using mixed methods with a systems thinking approach.
Expected outcomes of WHISTLERS project
The expected outcomes of WHISTLERS project are:
- Theoretical: a framework to understand the multilevel and complex sociotechnical dynamics of whistleblowing in healthcare;
- Empirical/methodological: a developed instrument to measure whistleblowing in healthcare, the establishment of an international time series data collection; and
- Practical/political: suggestions for stakeholders for the use of policymaking and practice.
This two-year research project forms the theoretical basis for researchers to develop interventions towards ethically sustainable and resilient healthcare.
Access our resources and opinion articles on this topic:
RTE Brainstorm (2020): Who’s going to speak up for Irish healthcare staff? (op-ed)
The Conversation (2020): Coronavirus shows the dangers of letting market forces govern health and social care. (op-ed with Prof M Fotaki)
RTE Brainstorm (2020): Can organizations be kept honest during the pandemic? (op-ed)
Centre for Health and the Public Interest [UK] (2020) Healthcare staff struggled to speak out long before COVID-19. They need help to do so now (op-ed with Prof M Fotaki)
We need to protect the whistleblowers who save our skins but pay the price
by Kate Kenny,
The recent Francis Report into how poor care at Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust was allowed to happen, was another lesson in just how valuable whistleblowers are to society. And yet as a society, we don’t seem to care that many struggle to survive.
Whistleblowers perform a vital role in today’s world. They alert the public to financial fraud, abuse in institutions and potential environmental disasters. For years, the NHS ignored attempts by whistleblowers to raise concerns about care that was “substandard, and sometimes unsafe”, while we now know that the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 could have been prevented had BP listened to just one of the many warnings coming from whistleblowers inside the company.
Read the full article on The Conversation
On compassion, markets and ethics of care
by Marianna Fotaki
‘Compassionate care must be at the centre of everything the NHS does’ proclaims the Government’s response to the Francis Report on the failures of care in the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust. Amongst many sensible recommendations, the most catchy and impressive is the one requiring ‘96% of senior leaders and all ministers at the Department of Health to have gained frontline experience in health and social care settings by the end of the year’
