31. Okt 2024

Exploring the role of agency and its structural context in regional healthcare practice change

Stefan Philipp and Anestis Amanatidis (University of Leiden) published a paper with the title "Talking about practice: agency and its structural context in regional healthcare practice change," in the Special Issue of Regional Studies: From new industrial path development to regional development outcomes.

The paper explores the question: How can actors in regional healthcare overcome structural constraints drive real change. In an age of ageing populations and rising non-communicable diseases, innovation in healthcare is urgently needed. Despite many new ideas, few innovations reach practical application. Our work sheds light on how actors navigate and adjust the complex organisational and institutional structures of the sector. By introducing a new strcuture-practice-agency framework, they examine how healthcare actors in Spain's Murcia region and Sweden's Örebro region identify, act upon, and shape opportunities for change within complex structural constraints. Our findings spotlight the vital role of intermediary actors who foster a “networked governance” model that mobilises resources and draws on a collective capacity to widen the regional opportunity space for change agency.

The key findings include that intermediary actors through system level agency create new spaces for change agency within healthcare. A new orientation towards experimentation and change can be interpreted as “first-level” change. Further, in Orebro, they also observed an institutional alignment between practices, organisational and institutional context during the change of healthcare practices, which they describe as “second-level” change. As regional healthcare systems face growing challenges, new, collaborative approaches like these are essential for maintaining healthcare’s foundational role in contributing to prosperous regional development.

The paper results from the research in the CHERRIES project, which was coordinated by Stefan Philipp. The open access publiscation can acessed on the Regional Studies website.

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Tags: health, innovation, practice, regional development