David Kocman, PhD

David holds two MA degrees (Sociology from the Charles University in Prague and Social Research Methods from the University of Kent), and a PhD in Social Policy for a thesis, Quality matters: re-formatting boundaries of care in Czech social care reform (also from the University of Kent). David also worked as a practitioner and a care coordinator in mental health services in London and in 2012-2013 he collaborated on a project reviewing quality standards in Czech social care.

David's thesis offered an empirically driven discussion of the mechanics and effects of quality reforms in public services as advanced by critical policy studies. Critical students have identified managerialism and marketization of public services as key conditions in introducing quality reforms. The study follows a specific, Czech, case of a quality reform in social care which was a reform without marketization and managerialism, yet with similar outcomes in the form of managerialised care. It shows that quality is a complex shibboleth able to re-format the content of practitioner work rather than merely re-structure organizational contexts of public service provision.

After completing his doctoral research David worked as a Research Associate at the Social Science Applied to Healthcare Improvement Research Group (SAPPHIRE), University of Leicester. Here David worked across a range of projects looking at quality and safety in healthcare, re-consenting for the use of tissue samples in biobanks, reporting of safety concerns by junior doctors, and implementation of clinical pathways which looked beyond the simple questions of compliance and fidelity in putting clinical pathways to work. It looked instead at the complexities and the uncertainties of health care improvement. At SAPPHIRE David also contributed to a project developing and testing a toolkit to improve hospital care for frail older patients.

As a Postoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Science, Institute of Sociology, David plans to develop ways of understanding changes in public services, and in healthcare specifically. David is interested in moving beyond the “externalist” analytics of managerialism and focus on the work of re-inventing managerial knowledge and tools as part of care practice – of doing clinical work. Staying within the critical sociological tradition, David wants to ask how previously managerial systems have been “clinicalised” as part of continued changes in healthcare. If ‘clinical governance’ in the 1990s was a case of managerialised healthcare, ‘quality improvement’ of the noughties and today may belong to a second generation of instigating change in healthcare.