Innovation and Sustainability in Large-Scale Healthcare Improvement Collaborative – Seven Propositions for Achieving System-wide Innovation and Sustainability

Change and reform in the Healthcare system, and policy determination to reduce costs has now necessitated a rethink and more innovation for this sector. In the healthcare sector, leadership needs to strengthen professionals who have the dual responsibility for ensuring the quality and effectiveness of healthcare and this requires new organisational forms beyond the traditional hierarchical organisational structures. Drawing upon strategic management and leadership discourse to underpin the study into sustainable and high performing systems, we then look at seven key lessons (propositions) from a mixed-methods study of a live city-wide large-scale collaborative in Leeds, UK. These seven propositions are framed in the context of leadership and strategy, however interesting and emergent findings also emerged as a result of the study. We thereby illuminate the challenges and opportunities to the collaboratives development in the context of global government calls for better healthcare management within the sector. We found that in the sustainability of such collaboratives, requires a more effective structure could be local city-wide collaborative in contrast to national or regional collaborative, however there are also several unknowns in such novel organisational structures. The shared and distributive form of leadership is underpinned with an energetic strategic leader who holds the centre whilst inspiring and empowering the collective nature of all members. This is also effectively achieved through promotion of a professional culture that is sustained through structured organisational learning. This paper adds to the small but growing body of knowledge in Improvement Collaboratives in the Health sector.

http://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/...