Institute for Leadership & Management in Health
The Institute of Leadership and Management in Health (ILMH) carry out a range of research in the area of health management. Study areas include leadership, technology management, outsourcing, management of remote staff, self-care, clinical networks, decentralisation & performance and medical regulation. Amongst current research projects are:
Management Practice in Healthcare Organisations
The aims of the project are to analyse the information behaviour of health service managers in decision-making in innovative change projects, to identify the facilitators and barriers to the use of information, and to develop guidelines for improving practice.
The term information behaviour covers the range of activities from awareness of a need for information or evidence to inform decision-making, through to the activities of searching, collecting, evaluating, and using such information. It also includes the role(s) that information intermediaries (knowledge managers, librarians etc.) play in such processes.
Managers’ information behaviour will clearly impact on their use of evidence in decision-making, and thus their potential for making high quality judgments that should improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness.
The focus of the research is on innovative change projects where managers cannot rely on past experience and in which awareness of the need for information tends to be highest.
E-solutions to the nurse rostering problem? Adoption, implementation and outcomes for stakeholders<
The focus of the study is a technology to assist with deployment - a task at the centre of effective management of health services. Staffing accounts for the major part of the healthcare budget and effective deployment is critical to efficiency and the quality of care. Thus e-rostering is of interest in its own right; however, it also exemplifies many of the problems experienced by the NHS with new technology-patchy uptake and variable success in its application. It is an ideal example from which to identify the factors that impede or facilitate technology adoption because the technology is relatively standard, but it has been applied with a high degree of variation in success.
The research draws on the literature on the management of organisational change and that concerned with technical innovation, to form a comprehensive model for analysis at organisational, group and individual levels. This will be used to identify the factors that facilitate and impede successful technological innovation.
More information about these and other research projects can be found here.
