Book Review: Transforming healthcare with qualitative research

The book Transforming Healthcare with Qualitative Research, edited by Frances Rapport and Jeffrey Braithwaite, articulates how qualitative research can catalyze the transformation of health services toward more flexible and adaptive systems that continue to deliver high-quality, safe and efficacious care in the face of increasing external pressures. This topic is of particular relevance to the healthcare community in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic and importance of ensuring resilience across health systems. Further, the health professions and evaluation community has increasingly been engaging with the theory and science of complex adaptive systems in building theory-driven models that consider both the intended and unintended outcomes of phenomena across heterogeneous cohorts. These theory-driven approaches rely on qualitative model building, which includes an array of methods covered in this forthcoming book, including soft systems methodology, functional resonance analysis, socio-narrative theories, and meta-ethnography. Our review presents an in-depth exploration and offers a new perspective on the substance of the book, as contextualized within the health-related professionals.