Facilitating Bottom-Up Knowledge to Support Decision-Making in Long-term Healthcare Providers

摘要

Service experiences in healthcare organisations and especially in long-term care are often intangible as they are the outcomes of interactions between organisations, employees and customers. They depend on soft factors like staff motivational levels, abilities and traits, role perceptions and management support. The clients and the frontline workers of service organisations have important roles to perform in the production of complex service output. It is not always possible to fully control the processes on the working floor. Hence, it is vital to acknowledge the fact that frontline workers and customers can help in understanding soft factors and complex relationships in the organisation if their collaborative participation is properly managed. Top-down style of management in traditional service organisations discourages participation of employees, customers and other stakeholders in decision making. Senior management of healthcare service organisations and policy makers need tools that will facilitate stakeholders' collaborative input and will help them produce long-term policies shaped by evidence in order to tackle the causes of the problems and not the symptoms. The case study, set in a healthcare service provider in the Netherlands, demonstrates that cognitive mapping and qualitative system dynamics techniques can be meaningfully combined to promote stakeholders representation in managerial decision making.