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Despite the prevalent use of professional status and service feedback in online healthcare markets, the potential interaction relationship between two types of information is still unknown. This study used the signaling theory to examine the substitute relationship between professional status and service feedback in patients' doctor choice, as well as the moderating effect of illness severity.

To test the paper's hypotheses, we constructed a panel data model using 418 doctors' data collected over a period of six months from an online healthcare market in China. Then, according to the results of the Hausman test, we estimated a fixed-effects model of patients' choice in online healthcare markets.

The empirical results showed that the effect of a doctor's professional status and service feedback on a patient's doctor choice was substitutable. Moreover, patients' illness severity played a moderating role, in that the influence of professional status on a patient with high-severity illness was higher than that on a patient with low-severity illness, whereas the influence of service feedback on a patient with low-severity illness was higher than that of a patient with high-severity illness. In addition, we found that illness severity negatively moderated the substitute relationship between professional status and service feedback on a patient's choice.

These findings not only contribute to signaling theory and research on online healthcare markets, but also help us understand the importance of professional status and service feedback on a patient's choice when seeking a doctor online.

The purpose of this study is to explore how healthcare professionals in Denmark perceived and enacted their role as diabetes trainers for Arabic-speaking immigrants in three new local authority settings. The paper used positioning theory, which is a dynamic alternative to the more static concept of role in that it seeks to capture the variable, situationally specific, multiple and shifting character of social interaction, as the analytical tool to examine how people situationally produce and explain behaviour of themselves and others.

The paper generated data through observation of diabetes training and of introductory interviews with training participants in three local authority healthcare centres over a total of five months. The authors conducted 12 individual interviews and two group interviews with healthcare professionals.

Healthcare professionals shifted between three positionings – caregiver, educator and expert. The caregiver was dominant in professionals’ ideals but less in their practice. Healthcare professionals other-positioned participants correspondingly as: vulnerable, difficult students and chronically ill. The two first other-positionings drew on dominant images of an ethnic other as different and problematic.

Becoming more reflexive and explicit about one's positionings offer the potential for a more conscious, confident, flexible and open-ended teaching practice. Such reflexivity may also reduce the perception that teaching challenges are rooted in participants’ ethnic background.

The paper provides a new understanding of healthcare practice by showing professionals’ multiple and reciprocal positionings and the potential and risks in this regard. The paper demonstrates the need for healthcare workers to reflect on their positionings not only in relation to immigrants, but to all patients.

Knowledge management is very useful to the most departments and sectors of the economy, and the healthcare sector is no exception. Thus, this paper aims to explore how healthcare professionals share knowledge in the Ghanaian healthcare sector. It also ascertains challenges faced by healthcare professionals in Ghana with regards to knowledge sharing.

The study used a case study research design. Data were collected from some healthcare professions working in the Ejisu-Juaben Municipality in Ghana using face-to-face interview. Data were analysed using thematic analysis technique.

The results show that the healthcare facilities studied do not have any formal knowledge management systems, and therefore healthcare professionals rely on informal conversations and seminars to share knowledge. Again, it was found that lack of trust, lack of technological facilities, lack of organizational policy regarding, fear of getting extra task or responsibility, network failure (both mobile phone and internet) and culture are some of the challenge healthcare professionals face in sharing knowledge.

This study contributes to the knowledge sharing literature especially in the healthcare sector in Ghana, as limited studies have been conducted in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore and demonstrate the ability of healthcare professionals to attain professional fulfilment when providing healthcare inspired by “value shops”.

A qualitative case study incorporating interviews and observations was conducted.

The empirical data suggest that the professional fulfilment of both physicians and nurses is facilitated when care is organized through “value shops”. Both groups of professionals state that they are able to return to their “professional core”.

The beneficial outcomes of organizing healthcare inspired by the “value shop” have previously been explored in terms of efficiency and quality. However, the professional fulfilment of healthcare professionals when providing such care has not been explicitly addressed. Professional fulfilment is vital in order to safeguard high-quality care, as well as healthcare professionals' involvement and engagement in implementing quality improvements. This paper highlights the fact that care provision inspired by the “value shop” may facilitate professional fulfilment, which further strengthens the potential positive outcomes of the “value shop” when utilized in a healthcare setting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process and impact of patient involvement in locally defined improvement projects in two hospital clinics. The paper particularly aims to examine how patient narratives, in the form of diaries and radio montage, help to create new insights into patient experience for healthcare professionals, and support professionals’ enrolment and mobilisation in innovation projects.

Two case studies were undertaken. These drew upon qualitative interviews with staff and participant observation during innovation workshops. Patient diaries and a recorded montage of patient voices were also collected.

The findings illuminate translation processes in healthcare innovation and the emergence of meaning making process for staff through the active use of patient narratives. The paper highlights the critical role of meaning making as an enabler of patient-centred change processes in healthcare via: local clinic mangers defining problems and ideas; collecting and sharing patient narratives in innovation workshops; and healthcare professionals’ interpretation of patient narratives supporting new insights into patient experience.

This study demonstrates how healthcare professionals’ meaning making can be supported by articulating, constructing, listening and interpreting patient narratives. The two cases demonstrate how patient narratives serve as reflective devices for healthcare professionals.

This study presents a novel demonstration of the importance of patient narratives for translating healthcare innovation in a clinical practice setting.

Much of the body of literature analysing the gig economy focuses on its exploitation of low-wage workers and its role in increasing precarious work. This chapter approaches the topic from a different angle, focussing on the contribution of the gig economy to the declining power of the medical profession. As well as facilitating and promulgating contingent work in healthcare, the gig economy disaggregates medical work into isolated on-demand micro-tasks on digital platforms. This has implications for the status and power of the medical profession, the doctor–patient relationship, and inter-professional boundaries in healthcare. The mechanisms through which these dynamics unfold, as well as the inter-related factors that support the transformations in the allocation and content of medical work, are discussed. These include the implications of heightened transparency of medical work resulting from unbundling of jobs, commodification of medical professionals, and platform-based vulnerabilities such as rating systems that impact doctor–patient relationships. Closure theory is drawn on to illuminate the dynamics of the transformation in professional boundaries and the arising conflict that it entails for the healthcare workforce at different levels. The conflict is theorised as an insidious exercise of closure by allied health professionals on the remit of the medical profession, which challenges remuneration, authority, and other exclusionary benefits traditionally accrued to the medical profession.

Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an increasingly important role in delivering healthcare today. Healthcare professionals, including consultants, doctors and nurses, are engaged in what is seen as a radical action plan for improving the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. A major focus of this plan is the greater empowerment of the patient, and providing them with more information about their health needs and care. Information and communication technology has the potential to effectively support the complexities involved in the communication that takes place both amongst healthcare workers themselves and between healthcare workers and their patients in both primary and secondary care both in the UK and elsewhere. This paper explores the challenges involved in human interaction and describes how AIDMAN, a clinical information system, allows for richer communication between the patient and those involved in their health.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of intellectual capital (IC) in promoting the sustainable development (SD) program of the Emilia-Romagna Health Service. The contributions of the following assets were investigated: leadership and competences, culture, performance measurement and incentives systems, social capital and technologies.

The case study was conducted following a hierarchical approach: perceptions of the regional directorate of public and social health, the general directors and healthcare professionals of the regional health system (the setting) were analyzed through interviews, focus groups and documentation in order to investigate: the emerging definition of SD within the setting; the role of IC, if any, in the achievement of the regional SD goals.

SD culture did not expand at the operative level because of the lack of involvement of healthcare professionals in a permanent dialogue for sustainability. Sustainability projects were not systematic which restricted the development of staff awareness of sustainability issues. Social capital enabled environmental projects and medical projects that increased patients’ involvement in disease management. Technology could help the shift toward sustainability, but it requires consideration of tangible and intangible costs for its successful adoption. SD performance measurement and incentives were in their infancy and cost accounting continues to dominate the healthcare sustainability debate.

Despite the low number of healthcare professionals involved in the focus groups, the paper represents one of the first attempts to frame their perceptions on SD implementation in healthcare.

Regional institutions should consider new ways of enacting SD which should be more inclusive of healthcare professionals. The establishment of a permanent interdisciplinary dialogue on sustainability would develop human, social and structural capital for sustainability. Healthcare organizations should monitor the environmental and social effects of their operations to enact their primary mission: the promotion of health.

The paper contributes to theory development related to the role of IC for SD in the public sector context and, in particular, in the healthcare sector where evidence is currently limited.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and improve patient care processes by collaborating patients, relatives and healthcare professionals.

To identify and improve patient care processes by collaborating patients, relatives and healthcare professionals.

Healthcare problems captured from collaboration between patients and healthcare professionals fall into simple, complicated and complex problems. Healthcare staff and patient experiences with patient processes differ, and a collaborative approach is needed to capture all areas needing improvement.

The conclusions are drawn from a project with few participants in a context that probably influenced the results. In contrast, other studies in the same area confirm the results.

The study outcomes have direct implications for healthcare professionals who can learn from patients involved in quality improvements such as this experience-based co-design (EBCD) project.

The paper contributes to limited studies on EBCD involving patients in healthcare quality improvements.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how, and under what conditions, professionals involve relatives in clinical practice.

Two cases were constructed from two studies in Denmark, theoretically inspired by Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and position and analyzed with focus on the involvement of relatives from the perspective of professionals.

Support to relatives in practice is rarely included in the way that treatment and care are organized in healthcare. Professionals’ views of the involvement of relatives were characterized by the values of neoliberal ideology and medical-professional rationality, in which relatives are not regarded as a subject of care and support in clinical practice. The involvement of relatives aimed to ensure patients’ participation in randomized clinical trial and to help professionals to care for patients when the professionals were not absolutely needed. Professionals were relatively higher positioned in the clinic than relatives were, which allowed professionals to in – and exclude relatives. Neoliberal ideology and medical-professional rationality go hand in hand when it comes to patient treatment, care and the involvement of relatives; it is all about efficiency, treatment optimization and increased social control of the diagnosed patient. These neoliberal, organizational values consolidate doxa of the medical field and the positions that govern the meeting with patients’ relatives – if it takes place at all.

The results put into perspective how the combination of neoliberalism and medical logic work as an organizing principle in contemporary healthcare systems, and challenge a normative, humanistic view on involving patients’ relatives in the medical clinic.