Members:
Professor Svend Erik Thomsen
It is well recognized that successful performance in the delivery of health care is not only a matter of having people with clinical skills on an appropriate high level. Health care delivery has for long been characterized as an area with increasing specialization, fast rate of change in knowledge, and last but not least an area with increasing interdependence among care givers (Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006). This characterization holds today more than ever, where the delivery of health care often must be coordinated between health care professionals from a wide range of specialized disciplines. Today the coordination challenge is becoming even harder, as the delivery of health care services in many cases spans across organizational borders, which calls for effective ways of securing inter-organizational collaboration (Lim et al., 2015). The amounts of challenges and their substantial consequences (both in terms of health care costs and consequences for staff and patients), makes it crucial important to direct research towards some of the health care challenges.
Studying the health care sector is not a discipline-based activity. The field draws from an eclectic group of disciplines, e.g. economics, sociology, social psychology, management, communication, organizational behavior, and of course all the clinical disciplines. As a consequence, the study of health care organizations and the people occupied in health care has had a hard time finding its natural home in many University departments around the world. This has in many instances resulted in unrelated research from single researchers rather than collective efforts in making theoretically based cumulative research in health care.
The aim of this cluster is to provide an international network for scholars at all levels interested in theoretical based studies of the challenges of people in health care. We envision that the cluster becomes an international hub for fruitful research collaboration, which includes but is not limited to the following activities:
- Sharing of research ideas
- Joint projects
- Sharing of empirical data, which allows cross-national comparisons
- Discussions of methodological approaches
- Workshops
- Conferences and conference tracks
- Joint publications
- Joint applications for research funding
- Sharing of educational activities, e.g. courses and programs
- Sharing ideas on dissemination of research to the health care sector and to the broader society
Being a part of COMAC in University of Southern Denmark in Slagelse (in the vicinity of Copenhagen) the cluster, People in health care is based on trans-disciplinarily, inclusiveness and porosity. This means that we welcome researchers and students from both inside the universities and outside the universities. We also welcome practitioners from all kinds of organizations related to – and interested in the delivery of health care.
We have planned that the cluster meets regularly in University of Southern Denmark, Slagelse. But the idea is also to locate cluster-meetings at different places, which enables that the members get to know each other’s workplaces. It is also envisioned that we will provide opportunities for international scholars to join the meetings online.
If you are interested in joining the cluster, please send an email to:
We look forward to hearing from you.