Assemblages of Patient Safety: Bringing together matters of concern between design and multiple knowledge practices in healthcare

This thesis identifies how design processes emerge during the use of devices in healthcare, by attending to assemblages where contingencies of risk and harm co-exist with the contribution of healthcare professionals to the safe care of patients. With support from the field of Science and Technology Studies, the thesis approaches such assemblages as heterogeneous in nature comprising of human and non-human entities that share capacities for action. The multi-sited ethnography of specific healthcare settings formed the basis of an analysis of how the nonhuman, as an actor, enters into emergent practices of interdisciplinary care.