PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Kieran G Sweeney
AU  - Russell Mannion
TI  - Complexity and clinical governance: using the insights to develop the strategy.
DP  - 2002 Oct 01
TA  - British Journal of General Practice
PG  - S4--S9
VI  - 52
IP  - Suppl
4099  - http://bjgp.org/content/52/supplement/S4.short
4100  - http://bjgp.org/content/52/supplement/S4.full
SO  - Br J Gen Pract2002 Oct 01; 52
AB  - There is increasing interest in complexity as an explanatory model to help understand how health care organisations operate and change. In this article, we present a brief introduction to some of the basic ideas in complexity and illustrate how these might be relevant to the process of implementing clinical governance. The implementation of clinical governance can be seen as a complex adaptive system: as such, we must accept that uncertainty and unpredictability are inescapable. This makes life uncomfortable for managers, but an understanding of how complex adaptive systems work helps us explore a range or management styles and practices, depending on how the 'system'--in this case the implementation of clinical govenance--is developing.