Bo Bergman
ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
Improvement science – Revolutionizing healthcare?
Currently, a huge transformation is going on in healthcare – perspectives, quite rare some ten years ago, are currently getting momentum. Some of these “new” perspectives are: the changing role of the patient as an active resource and co-producer as well as co-creator in the health care processes, an earlier unseen openness in healthcare about results, good as well as improvement possibilities, integrative approaches to bridge gaps between specialist islands including an emphasis on the value creating processes and an increasing emphasis on cross disciplinary teams, an emphasis on leader-ship and co-leadership (medarbetarskap in Swedish), etc.
In this paper, however, we will not directly look upon these different perspectives but rather the basic theories of importance for their successful enactment. Today´s scientific development is enormous and it is quite difficult to navigate among all the achievements scientists have been making in their respective fragmented theoretical frameworks. For a successful transformation of healthcare along the perspectives indicated above, a combination of different theories or rather – a system of theories – has to be exploited. In the healthcare improvement movement - requiring a transformed healthcare system – Deming´s “profound knowledge” has been taken as a starting point for a knowledge system needed for the understanding of management tasks in the transformation process. In health care this system is called a system of improvement knowledge. However, since the initial recommendations of Deming in the late eighties the building blocks of this system has evolved and new interpretations of the basic disciplines, i.e. “Appreciation of a system, Knowledge about variation, Theory of knowledge, Psychology” have changed considerably and new understandings have arisen. In this paper I will discuss experiences of educational dialogues and research, more or less based on an enhanced system of Improvement knowledge, together with healthcare improvement leaders and their organisations the last ten years and how the health care field – at least in Sweden – is in a process of transformation. A so called “paradigm shift” seems to be going on.
In the end of my talk I will also discuss what other industries can learn from healthcare – the knowledge flow from industry to healthcare might soon be reversed!
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bo Bergman is partly retiring from a chair in Quality Sciences at Chalmers University of Technology and currently also a guest professor at Meiji University, Tokyo. His career started with 15 years in aerospace industry during which period he also became a PhD in Mathematical statistics from Lund University and was a part time professor in Reliability at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. In 1983 he became a professor in Quality Technology at Linköping University and 1999 the SKF professor in Quality Management at Chalmers University of Technology. As a professor he has supervised a large number of PhD students many of which now are themselves professors. He founded the Centre for Healthcare Improvement together with colleagues eight years ago. The aim of this centre is to support healthcare in their improvement efforts primarily by continual education and research together with healthcare organisations. He is a member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) and an Academician of the International Academy for Quality (IAQ).
