The Journey Towards Self-managing Teams in a Home Care Unit

Abstract

The themes of this master project are the implementation of self- managing home healthcare teams, and the organizational and management challenges that are faced by healthcare leaders, when introducing and implementing new working processes within the Danish public healthcare sector.
I have chosen these themes, as I can see a growing trend in the public health care sectors of other countries for this new method of planning and working.
There is also a political expectation that citizens and patients receiving home care, experience continuity of care, which often requires a deal of flexibility from both nurses and health care assistants.
With allowing for this new way of working, the hope is that both nurses and health care assistants will thrive professionally and experience a greater degree of professional satisfaction in their daily work planning. The hope is that nurses and health care assistants will also experience more autonomy, and this in turn will lead to a better quality and more streamlined method of delivering home health care.
With focus on the organizational designs of public sector home healthcare teams before and after the implementation, my aim is to uncover which cultural norms and ideologies are prevalent in the existing home care teams. I am also interested in exploring which level of self-management the health care professionals have before the introduction and implementation of the new working method.
The study shows that nurses and healthcare professionals can see advantages with working together. However, the nurses retained a clear preference for working only with other nurses, though alongside other health care professionals.
The multi professional team gives the best outcome from a patient or home care user perspective, and the importance of this has been highlighted in the home health care department in Denmark. However, there is a need for descriptive working practices, which describe and recommend safe staffing levels, ensuring that employees with the correct professional background work on a roat together.
These findings highlight that a multi-professional team, who work together to complete allocated health related tasks with high focus on patient safety, ensures the best all round care outcome for the end user, whilst maximizing the professional competencies within the team. There is, however, a need for another model of organization that is approved and described, so that everyone in the professional health care team know their own responsibilities and tasks.