Incremental Innovations in Organizational Performance in Health Care

In this chapter we present a case of how the concept of patient-centred care moved from a concept generally defined in national policy documents to a concept as a point of orientation, and how it became a conceptual innovation in practice. The emphasis was on integrated forms of organization such as team work, networking and development coalition. Local-regional knowledge resources emerged as critically significant because this is knowledge linked to practice, which could, therefore, operate ‘on line’ and do things from inside the process rather than from afar. The case is built on the idea that the learning necessary to provide the concept with a specific content emerges only through launching efforts to make the concept real in specific situations. It demonstrates that these efforts do not take the form of simple ‘application’. Rather, they demand rethinking about what is already known, a process that leads to renewed understanding of the concept. The concept of patient-centred care was used to enable broad-based involvement, mobilization and learning as the basis for innovation.