Navigating towards sustainable Health Care

UMIO invited 20 representatives from Health Care Institutions working as director, manager, or being a member of the executive board. On behalf of MORSE 10 researchers, working as professor or PhD researcher, attended the session. The workshop followed the proven format of UM’s Service Science Factory to explore the challenges and obstacles encountered in Health Care when it gets to shaping a sustainable future. Quite quickly it became clear that the real sustainability problem in Health Care does not lie in waste management and use of physical resources, but the most urgent problem lies in creating a sustainable workforce. This is not only a matter of recruiting and training sufficient numbers of people, but at a deeper level the key issues relate to improving efficiency in the work, optimizing the planning of the work, and reconfiguring the governance and its overseeing of health care organizations. The complexity of Health Care is partly caused by the complexity of the professional services which need to be delivered by a wide range of highly specialized professionals and the demands of complex health issues. But together with the complicated work environment and its stakeholders (insurance companies, patient associations, labor unions, government, inspection bodies, accreditation bodies) managing daily health care has become a stressful event for its workers. As a consequence, sustainability in Health Care has become an issue of preventing turnover behavior and poor wellbeing of its workers caused by several inefficiencies in the delivery of services.

At the end of the evening, it was concluded that UMIO and MORSE should continue their efforts to bring the professional field together with academic researchers to acquire a better understanding of the causes of the complex work environment. For MORSE this implies to seek for synergies in its research community between different disciplines to collaborate with the Health Care field.