Swedish healthcare management practices and quality improvement work: development trends.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine developmental trends in healthcare organisation management practice and improvement work.

Design/methodology/approach: Primary healthcare centre (n = 1,031) and clinical hospital department (n = 1,542) managers were surveyed in spring 2007 (response rate 46 per cent). This article compares results from this survey with a study in 2003.

Developing and testing a model to predict outcomes of organizational change.

Health care decisions could be better informed by research evidence, but there are many areas in which there is little or inconclusive research. Pooling expert knowledge is one way to generate theories and make predictions in areas where there is little clear research evidence. This article addresses these two perspectives in parallel: (1) how to systematically build expert models that have a high predictive and explanatory value by the use of the Integrative Group Process and (2) a model to predict which quality improvement initiatives will be successful, the Swedish Organizational Change Model.

Surveying improvement activities in health care on a national level--the Swedish internal collaborative strategy and its challenges.

In order to map improvement activities in Swedish health care, we surveyed the managers of all primary health care centers (n = 958) and clinical hospital departments (n = 1355), with a response rate of 46%. The majority reports that their staff view improvement work positively. The most common driver of improvement is work environment problems, whereas external drivers have less influence.