Abstract
Background: Collaborative networks are increasingly recognized as a potential solution to the wicked problems in healthcare, such as shortages of workforce and higher demands for care. Over the past years, many initiatives have emerged to foster such collaboration, often involving cross-sectoral partnerships, bridging domains such as healthcare, social care, and municipal services. Collaboration often occurs across multiple levels; including the system, organizational, clinical, professional, and community level (including individuals, informal carers, and communities). However, it remains challenging to effectively coordinate across these levels, as they often fail to work together cohesively due to conflicting needs, misaligned goals, power dynamics, and lack of trust. Yet, such cohesion is essential to creating impact and keeping our health systems sustainable. Therefore, we have designed an interactive workshop with the aim of surfacing potential conflicts through an exercise, allowing participants to collaboratively explore strategies to overcome such conflicts.
Audience: This workshop targets a broad audience, including health care professionals, managers, policy makers, and researchers that are involved (or aiming to be involved) in a collaborative network. Our workshop will raise awareness about potential conflicts that arise in collaborative networks, and equip participants with strategies to create more cohesion between different levels of collaboration.
Approach: Our workshop will briefly introduce three cases of collaborative approaches in the Netherlands, highlighting practical challenges in coordinating multiple levels of collaboration (care professionals, middle management, and executive level) (20minutes). Participants will receive an overview of the workshop structure and goals, followed by an opportunity to ask questions (10minutes). Participants will be divided into subgroups and will begin with an introduction round to get acquainted (10minutes). Within the subgroups, each participant will take on a role representing an organizational level (strategic, tactical and operational). The participants will have a discussion on starting a collaborative network, addressing the different needs and goals that come into play at these various levels, which can sometimes conflict. In this workshop, we aim to bring those conflicts to the surface and look for solutions or strategies to overcome them. The participants then experience the bottlenecks but also jointly think of strategies that might bring them forward (25 minutes). After the subgroup discussions, participants will come together for a plenary session where each group will present their findings, and share their overall experiences (15 minutes). We will end with a 10 minute closing and reflection, where we discuss the take-home messages of the workshop.
Outcomes: Our workshop will offer participants 1) Insights into the challenges and opportunities of coordinating across multiple levels of collaborative networks, 2) Strategies to align these levels to foster effective collaboration, and 3) Opportunities to learn about best practices from other participants that can be applied to their own contexts.