The Soviet, the European, The Latvian: Implementing Global Patient Safety Standards in post-Soviet Latvia

Abstract

Patient safety issues gained global attention when evidence of modern medicine’s negative impacts on patient health and wellbeing emerged. Such “side effects” of modern medicine as antimicrobial resistance, medication errors, device failures and healthcare-acquired infections have created problems for patients and health services in all countries. Since the late 1990s these patient safety issues have been high on the transnational healthcare agendas. The global concern of patient safety has resulted in international standardization of patient safety in formulating and implementing policies and producing new practices and biomedical knowledge.

The article is based on one year of fieldwork data (interviews with hospital infection control specialists, interviews and focus group discussions with patients, and analysis of political documents and electronic media) completed within an interdisciplinary research project on biosafety and biotechnologies. Not only have patients and microbes become “mobile” - patient safety standards are “travelling” between different locations and contexts. In post-Soviet Latvia, the interaction between the Soviet legacy, local specificity, and globalized standards of patient safety creates culturally specific understandings and practices of hospital infection control. In Latvia, infection control discourse has come to deal less with patient safety risks but more with the struggle between new biomedical knowledge and firmly fixed healthcare practices and the power relationships between patients and physicians, as well as general medical staff and infection control specialists.