We are delighted to invite you to our upcoming SafetyNet webinar: Understanding and measuring emergency doctors’ tolerance of clinical uncertainty: Insights from mixed-methods research and suggestions for future intervention development.

Join us as we hear from Dr Emily Parker, a Hospital Discharge Policy Officer at the Department of Health and Social Care, and Dr Luke Budworth, Senior Research Data Analyst at the NIHR Yorkshire and Humber PSRC.

 Date: Wednesday, 12 November
 Time: 12:30pm – 1:30pm
📍 Where: Online (Zoom)

Emergency department (ED) doctors regularly make high-stakes decisions under conditions of significant uncertainty. Decisions regarding patient admission, discharge, and clinical investigation often occur with incomplete information, under significant time constraints, and with minimal post-discharge feedback. While a higher tolerance of uncertainty (UT) has been associated with improved clinician well-being and more judicious resource use in other medical specialties, its specific role and impact in emergency medicine remain underexplored. Most existing interventions and research on UT have focused on general practitioners or medical students, overlooking the unique challenges of the ED context.

This seminar will report on a series of mixed-methods studies conducted in Yorkshire that aimed to advance understanding of how emergency doctors experience, interpret, and manage clinical uncertainty. The research addressed four key aims: (1) to explore how UT manifests in emergency care, (2) to develop and validate a UT measure tailored specifically to the ED context, (3) to examine associations between UT, clinician characteristics (e.g., experience), patient outcomes (e.g., reattendance), and healthcare resource utilisation, and (4) to identify the focus of UT interventions in an ED context.

Following an overview of the existing literature on UT in emergency medicine, the presentation will summarise key findings from both qualitative and quantitative phases of the research. Presenters will outline the factors identified as influencing UT and consider their implications for clinical practice, workforce development, and health system efficiency. The session will conclude with a discussion of the theoretical frameworks underpinning the work, and offer recommendations for future research and the design of interventions aimed at supporting the development of UT in ED clinicians.

Meet the speakers

Dr Emily Parker is a Hospital Discharge Policy Officer at the Department of Health and Social Care working on discharge-related assessment policy. She previously worked as a research fellow in the Yorkshire and Humber National Institute for Health Research Applied Research Collaboration, specifically within the Improvement Science research theme. Emily received a PhD in health psychology from the University of Leeds in 2024, funded by the Yorkshire and Humber National Institute for Health Research Patient Safety Research Collaboration Centre. Emily’s PhD used mixed methods to develop uncertainty tolerance theory and identify potential areas of focus for uncertainty tolerance interventions in an Emergency Department context.

Dr Luke Budworth is a senior research data analyst at the NIHR Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Collaboration, primarily working within the Rethinking Safety Intelligence for Improvement theme. He leads and supports projects that use large, linked healthcare datasets—particularly via Connected Bradford—to understand and develop tools for addressing patient safety challenges. His expertise lies in statistical modelling, health data science, and applied analytics, with interests in intersectionality analysis, risk prediction, and causal inference for safety. Luke holds an MSc and PhD in Health Psychology from the University of Leeds (2015, 2018) and an MSc in Health Data Analytics from University College London (2022). 

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