Interdisciplinary research in psychology and law, in particular theoretical aspects of interdisciplinary work
The psychology of legal decision-making; the social psychology of legal disputes
Blaming, accountability and disputing
The construction and use of information about risk
Routine decision making
Specific current areas: Regulation and 'compensation culture'; Medical regulation by the General Medical Council

Selected publications

Hutter, B.M. and Lloyd-Bostock, S. (2008) 'Reforming regulation of the medical profession: the risks of risk-based approaches|.' Health, Risk and Society 10, no. 1 pp. 69-83.

Abstract
Risk-based regulation is growing in popularity and in the UK has official backing as part of the government's modernization programme. State and non-state regulators alike are under pressure to adopt risk-based approaches.

With radical reform of the General Medical Council (GMC) in progress, the rhetoric of risk-based regulation is used by both the Department of Health and the GMC, and is evident in the 2007 White Paper 'Trust, Assurance and Safety - The Regulation of Health Professionals in the 21st Century'. This paper focuses on the dilemmas inherent in risk-based approaches to regulation by the GMC. Two sources of difficulty are examined. First, the evidential demands can be heavy and costly.

Databases and information sources related to patient safety and the performance of doctors are proliferating, but have important limitations. Second, decisions about which risk factors to include and how to weight them are riddled with difficulties, both technical and normative.

One attraction of risk-based approaches is that they seem to offer objectivity, but it is questionable how far this is possible in practice. Risk information is neither generated nor used against a neutral background. In the medical regulation arena, questions of public trust and confidence are crucial: risk-based regulation does not help deal with these.

Furthermore, a focus on individual doctors and a certain amount of blame and sanctioning would seem to be integral to regulatory functions of such bodies as the GMC. The paper poses fundamental questions about how blame-free these systems really can be.

Projects

An analysis of data on registration and fitness to practice cases held by the GMC in the context of risk-based approaches to medical regulation

Funded by the ESRC within the Public Services Programme (Programme Director: Christopher Hood, Gladstone Professor of Government and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. (http://www.publicservices.ac.uk)

This is an exploratory project over one year, scheduled to end in February 2009. As risk-based approaches to regulation become increasingly popular, sources of potentially relevant data are being sought to meet the approaches' heavy information demands. The project's main objective is to assess data held by the General Medical Council (GMC) in the context of its potential value for informing and shaping regulatory activity. The GMC records basic registration information on individual doctors, and detailed information on 'fitness to practice' cases.

The project aims to clarify the nature of the information currently in the GMC's databases, and to ask what can be learnt from it, either on its own or in combination with other sources of information, for regulatory purposes beyond handling individual cases. What is the potential and what are the pitfalls in using this information for identifying and assessing risks?

Any information is a function of the processes whereby it has been generated, and information generated in one context for particular purposes can have important limitations in another context. The project therefore concentrates on the sources of the GMC's information, the purposes for which it is collected, its filtering and coding.

News items

Submitted an End of Award Report to the ESRC on her project 'An Analysis of Data on Registration and Fitness to Practice Cases Held by the General Medical Council in the Context of Risk-Based Approaches to Medical Regulation' in November 2009.
Sally Lloyd-Bostock will be presenting a paper titled 'Organisational Context and the Creation of Risk-Related Information by the General Medical Council' at the at the Law and Society Association Annual Conference in Denver, USA. 28-31 May.