Abstract
This paper develops an analytical framework using process thinking to achieve sustainable healthcare services. Healthcare is characterised by low economic efficiency. At the same time, it is embedded in ethical concerns related to society and nature. Healthcare is thus conceptualised as functionality in an ecosystem. The patient is woven into both nature and society. Given the complex nature of healthcare services, we seek an alternative way to understand healthcare services, focusing on the exchange aspect of the economy. We offer a conceptual model that helps build an analytical framework focusing on how practitioners and leaders in healthcare frame their activities. This framing provides guidance in healthcare practice. Furthermore, framing is associated with both healthcare service providers as well as patients and next of kin—the recipients. This framework aims to guide practical research and development activities in healthcare.
Highlights
Healthcare services often have a high level of criticality and they are intertwined with ethical issues of human well-being
Founded on the classification of interdependency, integration, and interaction as key features of services supply provided by Janusz et al [5], this understanding of healthcare as an emergent process in a serviceproducing network is conceptualised as shown in Figure 5: On these grounds, Janusz et al [5] develop an analytical framework where process development involves knowing: (1) the business relationship interdependencies (2) how well integrated the network is
As pointed out by White [3], addressing sustainability increases research complexity since it widens the realm of which healthcare management must take into consideration upon decision-making
Summary
This paper aims to develop an analytical framework that applies process thinking to achieve sustainable healthcare services This approach includes applying ecosystems thinking to developing practices in healthcare management. Including assessment of contingencies, healthcare’s environmental needs are not limited to economic concerns, and that healthcare concerns both societal ethics and nature-related biology concerns By pointing to this processfounded people-in-context approach to research healthcare, this conceptual development further develops preceding conceptual research [1,2] by creating a stronger focus on how to do such research in healthcare in scientific practice. The application of “sustainability” underpins the importance of achieving continuous improvement in healthcare service provision It is in this mainly the societal aspect of sustainability that is in force notwithstanding that people are biological beings embedded in both nature and an economy. A conceptual model to guide research on understanding and developing environmentally contingent framing of healthcare services is provided
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