‘You cannot expect healthcare professionals in Value-Based Healthcare teams to be able to work together without training’
Value-Based Healthcare in a nutshell? Structural cooperation between healthcare professionals to provide patients with appropriate care and save costs. PhD candidate Dorine van Staalduinen conducted research on the implementation of Value-Based Healthcare and discovered that structural cooperation is still a big challenge.
‘I conducted research in five different hospitals on Value-Based Healthcare teams, i.e. teams in which different healthcare specialists work together to treat a certain type of condition,’ Dorine van Staalduinen explains. 'Take breast cancer, for example. A patient suffering from it has to deal with an oncologist, radiologist, nursing specialist, a physiotherapist and a social worker, among others. In a Value-Based Healthcare team, all these different parties are expected to work together to add as much value as possible for the patient, with as little cost as possible.'
'Many people did not even know they were in a Value-Based Healthcare team together.'
‘Doctors just need to be able to work together’
Through questionnaires and interviews, Van Staalduinen discovered what the Value-Based Healthcare teams thought of the structural cooperation expected of them. It turned out to be that many people did not even know they were in a Value-Based Healthcare team together. Additionally, a shared idea of what constitutes good cooperation was often lacking.
Van Staalduinen: ‘Managers in hospitals are quick to think that smart people like doctors can just work together and thus easily add value with other healthcare professionals in a Value-Based Healthecare team. As a result, healthcare professionals are usually placed in Value-Based Healthcare teams without much guidance. But you cannot expect healthcare professionals from different medical backgrounds to be able to work together without training. They all have different ideas about how you work together and what that means, so more guidance is needed at the front end.’
Slow progression
Van Staalduinen does see that this is slowly changing. 'When I started my PhD research, the healthcare professionals involved in Value-Based Healthcare had little room to learn about effective collaboration. This was partly because hospitals themselves were still discovering what Value-Based Healthcare was exactly. But now training programmes are being set up to prepare healthcare professionals to work in a Value-Based Healthcare team. I myself am very happy about this because if there is one result I want to emphasise from my dissertation is that we need to pay much more attention to the healthcare professionals who have to implement Value-Based Healthcare.'
'We want to bring theory and practice together.'
Symposium
To exchange knowledge on other aspects of Value-Based Healthcare, the English-language research symposium ‘Understanding managerial perspectives on healthcare delivery’ will take place prior to Van Staalduinen's defence (10:00-12:00). ‘This is open to everyone, but of particular interest to people who want to know how to deliver the best care to patients according to the principles of Value-Based Healthcare,’ says Van Staalduinen. ‘We want to bring theory and practice together so urge not only academics but also healthcare professionals and consultants to come!’
Dorine van Staalduinen will defend her thesis on 24 Oktober, ‘A managerial perspective on value-based healthcare: understanding the roles of management, teamwork, and leadership in the development of hospitals towards delivering value-based healthcare.’ Watch the live stream.