5. Organisational Science

This cross-cutting theme draws upon organisation science as a necessary component of service delivery/implementation science. Since our proposed ARC-WM is slanted to tackle generic service issues the topic of integration emerges as a critical issue across all our research themes, particularly across health and social care. All themes, and most identified projects, cross multiple clinical services and sector domains, including primary and social care. However, integrated care has proved difficult to realise in practice. We examine potential solutions to the integrated care challenge at multiple levels:

1. Organisational level: Improving integration of care requires changes in pathways of care, which invokes a need for workforce role change. This in turn brings in consideration of human relationships, resource re-allocation, new modes of leadership and accountabilities, knowledge mobilisation, and greater patient and carer involvement, alongside a need to enact strategy collaboratively across organisations. Our work is thus well-aligned to objectives of Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships and will enable us to explore factors affecting cross sectoral working in depth.
2. Individual level: Integrated care invokes need for behavioural change from professionals, managers developing and delivering care and also from patients and carers. While knowledge of barriers to change are well understood, much more work is required on how to influence individuals when services are undergoing change.
3. Technological level: We will examine socio-technical factors that operate when digital technologies support integrated care through providing timely access to real time data to inform clinical decision-making; real time digital access to provide early warning, for example of hypothermia; and data integration to support strategic planning in health organisations.

We have worked closely together as research themes in the CLAHRC-WM and have learned how to work across organisational and clinical science.