Dilemmas and Optimization of Collaborative Governance of Food Safety in Public Hospitals from the Multi-Subject Psychological Game Perspective

Abstract

Food safety within public hospitals directly determines the physical recovery of inpatients and the efficiency of hospital public health management. Meanwhile, the psychological divergence among multiple stakeholders has gradually become the core obstacle restricting collaborative food safety governance in institutional catering scenarios. Based on psychological game theory, prospect theory, and health risk perception psychology, this conceptual theoretical review paper adopts a theoretical deduction framework to systematically sort out three core participants, namely: hospital administrative management, canteen catering practitioners, and inpatients. It also analyzes the heterogeneous psychological preferences, risk-cognitive biases, and benefit-driven psychological game logic behind the inconsistent behavioral choices of each subject in hospital food safety management. The existing collaborative predicaments stem from the prisoner's dilemma formed by the opportunistic psychology of catering staff, the risk amplification psychology and passive supervision psychology of hospital administrators, as well as the asymmetric risk perception and negative trust psychology of hospitalized patients. These factors jointly lead to insufficient daily supervision, inadequate implementation of hygiene specifications, and low patient participation in supervision. On the basis of clarifying the root causes of multi-body psychological conflicts, this study proposes targeted optimization paths covering psychological intervention, organizational atmosphere construction, improvement of risk communication, and design of incentive restraint mechanisms. The aim is to weaken the non-cooperative psychological tendencies of all participants and promote the transformation from scattered individual management to integrated collaborative food safety governance within public hospitals.