Frontline meetings as support for cross-boundary coordination in hospitals

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate frontline meetings in hospitals and how they are used for coordination of daily operations across organizational and occupational boundaries. Design/methodology/approach An in-depth multiple-case study of four purposefully selected departments from four different hospitals is conducted. The selected cases had actively developed and embedded scheduled meetings as structural means to achieve coordination of daily operations. Findings Health care professionals and managers, next to their traditional mono-professional meetings (e.g. doctors or nurses), develop additional operational, daily meetings such as work-shift meetings, huddles and hand-off meetings to solve concrete care tasks. These new types of meetings are typically short, task focussed, led by a chair and often inter-disciplinary. The meetings secure a personal proximity which the increased dependency on hospital-wide IT solutions cannot. During meetings, objects and representations (e.g. monitors, whiteboards or paper cards) create a needed gathering point to span across boundaries. As regards embedding meetings, local engagement helps contextualizing meetings and solving concrete care tasks, thereby making health care professionals more likely to value these daily meeting spaces. Practical implications Health care professionals and managers can use formal meeting spaces aided by objects and representations to support solving daily and interdependent health care tasks in ways that IT solutions in hospitals do not offer today. Implementation requires local engagement and contextualization. Originality/value This research paper shows the importance of daily, operational hospital meetings for frontline coordination. Organizational meetings are a prevalent collaborative activity, yet scarcely researched organizational phenomenon.

Sustainable process improvements: Evidence from intervention‐based research

“…The institutionalization of a system of huddles noted in Section 3 helped achieve the objective of defining responsibilities and creating a system and structure for involvement of middle managers in PI. The huddles also ensure that handoffs among employees are seamless (Prætorius & Hasle, 2019). Examples of topics discussed in these huddles are: Who are getting discharged—and their aptitude on post‐surgical care instructions? Staffing levels in the unit for that day Hand‐off process between inpatient and outpatient unit (e.g., has the outpatient coordinator met the patient and discussed Part 2 of the instructional delivery?…”

“…The institutionalization of a system of huddles noted in Section 3 helped achieve the objective of defining responsibilities and creating a system and structure for involvement of middle managers in PI. The huddles also ensure that handoffs among employees are seamless (Praetorius & Hasle, 2019). Examples of topics discussed in these huddles are:…”

Governance and coordination in health care: organic processes and structural capacity

“…They focus on how and why meetings are conducted, undertaking a qualitative multiple-case study of five departments in four Danish hospitals. Meetings that are problem and task-focused were found to increase their relevance and perceived utility in managing interdependencies among those in different roles and units, and collaborative capacities (Praetorius and Hasle, 2019). Short, mobile, relatively informal meetings, in particular, facilitated work across both inter-professional and clinical-organizational boundaries.…”