Prospective sensemaking of a national quality register in health care and elderly care

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine how external change agents (ECAs) engaged to disseminate a national quality register (NQR) called Senior alert nationwide in the Swedish health care and elderly care sectors interpret their work. To study this, sensemaking theories are used.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a qualitative inductive interview study including eight ECAs. To analyze the data, a thematic analysis is carried out.

Findings

Well-disseminated NQRs support health care organizations’ possibility to work with quality improvement and to improve care for patient groups. NQRs function as artifacts that can influence how health care professionals make sense of their work. In this paper, a typology depicting how the ECAs make sense of their dissemination work has been developed. The ECAs are engaged in prospective sensemaking. They describe their work as being about creating future good results, both for patients and affiliated organizations, and they can balance different quality aspects.

Originality/value

The number of NQRs increased markedly in Sweden and elsewhere, but there are few reports on how health care professionals working with the registers interpret their work. The use of ECAs to disseminate NQRs is a novel approach. This paper describes how the ECAs are engaged in prospective sensemaking – an under-researched perspective of the sensemaking theory.

Citation

Nordin, A.M.M., Andersson Gäre, B. and Andersson, A.-C. (2018), "Prospective sensemaking of a national quality register in health care and elderly care", Leadership in Health Services, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 398-408. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHS-03-2017-0012