For better or worse: Governing healthcare organisations in times of financial distress.

Due to processes of financialisation, financial parties increasingly penetrate the healthcare domain and determine under which conditions care is delivered. Their influence becomes especially visible when healthcare organisations face financial distress. By zooming-in on two of such cases, we come to know more about the considerations, motives and actions of financial parties in healthcare.

Organizational attributes that contribute to the learning & improvement capabilities of healthcare organizations: a scoping review.

Background: This study aims to explore and identify the organizational attributes that contribute to learning and improvement capabilities (L&IC) in healthcare organizations. The authors define learning as a structured update of system properties based on new information, and improvement as a closer correspondence between actual and desired standards. They highlight the importance of learning and improvement capabilities in maintaining high-quality care, and emphasize the need for empirical research on organizational attributes that contribute to these capabilities.

Health care reform and financial crisis in the Netherlands: consequences for the financial arena of health care organizations.

Over the past decade, many health care systems across the Global North have implemented elements of market mechanisms while also dealing with the consequences of the financial crisis. Although effects of these two developments have been researched separately, their combined impact on the governance of health care organizations has received less attention. The aim of this study is to understand how health care reforms and the financial crisis together shaped new roles and interactions within health care.

Bedtime negotiations: Unravelling normative complexity in hospital-based prevention.

This study explores how actors deal with normative complexity in the design and implementation of practices of preventative care. Previous studies have identified conflicting (e)valuations of prevention within health care at large, but little empirical research describes how these conflicts are resolved in day-to-day interactions. Zooming in on the work of a single actor, our ethnographic study describes a Dutch psychiatrist developing a novel type of hospital bed that provides preventative psychiatric care for women in the post-partum period.