Comfort with uncertainty in medical professionals: an exploration of how clinicians experience and manage dynamic problems in practice

This thesis explored physicians’ in-the-moment experiences of uncertainty at work, seeking to better understand how they used dynamic appraisals of comfort and discomfort to safely manage complex problems in practice despite their ongoing sense of uncertainty. These efforts included making predictions about how a problem might evolve, thinking about the human and material resources they could draw upon to ensure patient safety, and engaging colleagues to ‘borrow comfort’ when they encountered problems that were at the borders of their abilities.