Marlot Kuiper

With hindsight, although it is an experience I would have loved to miss, I do think this ‘patient’s perspective’ has been a valuable addition to my research experience. Being a patient myself brought me valuable insights into what it is like to undergo surgery, and more specifically, how safety procedures are experienced by patients. You literally give yourself and your body over to the surgical team. The way they approach you, and the way they go about safety procedures really matters for trusting the team. With this dissertation, I hope to take the readers to the surgical department themselves, to ‘see’ how checklists work in medical practice. However, I also aim to offer more than that. The empirical accounts described in this PhD thesis do not stand on their own. At various moments, I zoom out to analyse these accounts and to make sense of the findings in terms of current academic debates from different fields. I aim to explain what we can learn practically and theoretically from ‘checklists in surgical care’ about ‘standardization in professional services’. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I will identify the research problem and explain why I emerged myself into surgery as a field of study. In chapter 2, I will discuss current academic debates about (the reconfiguration of) professional work and standardization. I will shed light upon different approaches to ‘implementing’ standards – and professionals’ responses to such standards. In chapter 3, I work towards a research perspective to study how standards ‘work’. Inspired by Routine Theory, I built an analytical framework that guides the three empirical chapters. The fourth chapter is about the design; I write about ethnography ing , and how I went about headwork, fieldwork, and textwork. Chapters 5,6 and 7 are the empirical chapters in which I present and interpret the findings. The final chapter 8 provides overarching conclusions, discussions and reflections. The various intermezzos throughout the dissertation provide additional reflections on the fieldwork, and my role as a researcher. Marlot Kuiper, January 2020