Health services management research : an official journal of the Association of University Programs in Health Administration
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Health Serv Manage Res · Nov 2018
Case ReportsModularising outpatient care delivery: A mixed methods case study at a Finnish University Hospital.
Modularisation is a potential means to develop health care delivery by combining standardisation and customisation. However, little is known about the effects of modularisation on hospital care. The objective was to analyse how modularisation may change and support health care delivery in specialised hospital care. ⋯ Modularisation may support health care providers in classifying patients and delivering services according to patients' needs. However, as the findings are based on a single university hospital case study, more research is needed.
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Health Serv Manage Res · Nov 2013
Hospital characteristics affecting potentially avoidable emergency admissions: national ecological study.
Some emergency admissions can be avoided if acute exacerbations of health problems are managed by emergency and urgent care services without resorting to admission to a hospital bed. In England, these services include hospitals, emergency ambulance, and a range of primary and community services. The aim was to identify whether characteristics of hospitals affect potentially avoidable emergency admission rates. ⋯ Explanatory factors of this variation included those which hospital managers could not control (demand for hospital emergency departments) and those which they could control (supply in terms of numbers of acute beds in the hospital, and management of non-emergency and emergency patients within the hospital). Avoidable admission rates were higher for hospitals with higher emergency department attendance rates, higher numbers of acute beds per 1000 catchment population and higher conversion rates from emergency department attendance to admission. Hospital managers may be able to reduce avoidable emergency admissions by reducing supply of acute beds and conversion rates from emergency department attendance.
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Health Serv Manage Res · Feb 2013
Leadership and transformational change in healthcare organisations: a qualitative analysis of the North East Transformation System.
The research project 'An Evaluation of Transformational Change in NHS North East' examines the progress and success of National Health Service (NHS) organisations in north east England in implementing and embedding the North East Transformation System (NETS), a region-wide programme to improve healthcare quality and safety, and to reduce waste, using a combination of Vision, Compact, and Lean-based Method. This paper concentrates on findings concerning the role of leadership in enabling tranformational change, based on semi-structured interviews with a mix of senior NHS managers and quality improvement staff in 14 study sites. Most interviewees felt that implementing the NETS requires committed, stable leadership, attention to team-building across disciplines and leadership development at many levels. We conclude that without senior leader commitment to continuous improvement over a long time scale and serious efforts to distribute leadership tasks to all levels, healthcare organisations are less likely to achieve positive changes in managerial-clinical relations, sustainable improvements to organisational culture and, ultimately, the region-wide step change in quality, safety and efficiency that the NETS was designed to deliver.