Whitehead B, Barker, D (2010) Does the risk of reprisal prevent nurses in the NHS from blowing the whistle on bad practice? Nursing Times; 106: 43, early on-line publication. Background Despite the introduction of legislation to protect people who report poor or unsafe practice, whistleblowing can still have serious consequences for nurses. Aim To review the literature on whistleblowing in heal...

An ethical culture is necessary to prevent and manage whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is often the result of an organizational culture that lacks the accountability for its espoused values.

Whistleblowing by health professionals is an infrequent and extraordinary event and need not occur if internal voices are heard. Mannion and Davies' editorial on "Cultures of Silence and Cultures of Voice: The Role of Whistleblowing in Healthcare Organisations" asks the question whether whistleblowing ameliorates or exacerbates the 'deaf effect' prevalent in healthcare organisations. This comme...

Mannion and Davies' article recognises whistleblowing as an important means of identifying quality and safety issues in healthcare organisations. While 'voice' is a useful lens through which to examine whistleblowing, it also obscures a shifting pattern of uncertain 'truths.' By contextualising cultures which support or impede whislteblowing at an organisational level, two issues are overlooked...

The e-government application may enhance government facilities for its shareholders. Nevertheless, implementing such system faces many difficulties and obstacles. The considerable debacle of e-government inspires studies on those obstacles, especially in developing countries around the world. To examine the e-government implementation challenges more accurately, we have collected more tha...

The iatrogenic pandemic of untreated illness related to falsified and substandard medicines is intolerable, but has a logical explanation: in many countries, inadequate laws make it barely illegal to manufacture or distribute poor-quality medicines. The law hardly punishes those who intentionally or recklessly deal in falsified or substandard medicine, when clearly it should criminalize these p...

In a recent article, Mannion and Davies argue that there are a multitude of ways in which organizations (such as the National Health Service [NHS]) can deal with wrongdoing or ethical problems, including the formation of policies that encourage and protect would-be whistleblowers. However, it is important to distinguish internal reporting about wrongdoing from whistleblowing proper, because the...

Neutralization theory, which explains internal excuse-making behavior, is adopted from criminology and policy compliance research and theoretically incorporated with a climate of silence model from extant whistleblowing research. Through an empirical test utilizing scenario-based field research, neutralization and climate of silence are demonstrated to jointly predict whistleblowing intentions. *