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Biomedical subjects

John Skår

Publications and source records attributed to John Skår.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Introduction: self-organization as an actual theme.

Self-organization is a widely observed phenomenon in nature and in life. Scientists from many disciplines are now searching for explanatory and regulatory mechanisms of self-organization and its role and location in dynamic complex systems. The role of self-organization is important, and recent attempts to reveal the creative and innovative mechanisms by using computers and experiments are promising. Self-organization is an enigma it is time to solve. This issue is a special report on some of the exciting research efforts now being done to increase our knowledge of self-organization in biological systems in particular.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Learning helpers: how they facilitated improvement and improved facilitation--lessons from a hospital-wide quality improvement initiative.

Quality improvement is a leading approach to the difficult yet inevitable task of managing organizational change. The literature suggests that facilitators can help organizations apply improvement principles and tools but it is unclear how facilitators actually do this and how they develop their own skills. Using a case study design we therefore examined how facilitators worked with 93 improvement projects in over 1000 sessions at one Swedish university hospital where systematic process improvement was successfully established over a 5-year period. They facilitated improvement by providing a framework and methods' support for improvement efforts--relying on experiential learning rather than didactic teaching--while letting clinical teams and managers maintain control over the content of improvement projects. They developed extensive experience that they documented and could transfer between teams, so that each team could benefit from lessons learned elsewhere. They improved facilitation through participant feedback and systematic review and reflection regarding their own practice. We suggest that facilitators can help organizations manage change by assuming responsibility for demanding tasks related to improvement work, developing specialized skill and extensive experience regarding improvement, and transferring insights across the organization, while using a learning approach throughout including to their own work.

Hospitals, University↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Getting going together: can clinical teams and managers collaborate to identify problems and initiate improvement?

A clear aim is key for the success of improvement projects, yet many fail already at this stage. We studied how clinical teams and managers at a university hospital in Sweden identified problems and defined aims as they initiated 24 process improvement projects. Categorizing and comparing problems at 3 stages of problem definition, we found that the majority of problems fell into 1 of 3 categories: information issues, poor procedures, and waiting times. Going through these stages, managers and clinical teams prioritized waiting-time problems. We show how managers can ask such teams to quickly identify problems suited for improvement projects through this step-wise, facts-based approach. We conclude that they can add their management perspective when giving specific assignments, to harness the combined benefits of both a bottom-up and a top-down approach to improvement.

Cooperative Behavior↗