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. 2024 Jan 31;39(4):412–428. doi: 10.1093/heapol/czae005

Table 2.

Policy and practical implications of this scoping review

Key results Practical implications for practice and healthcare organizations
Contextual drivers for change In context where reforms are implemented in top-down fashion, we urge decision makers to foster bottom-up implementation of healthcare networks by embedding them within the decentralized administrative health regions and by promoting the stewardship of the Ministry of Health and multisectoral collaboration at local levels. This will allow better contextualization of healthcare networks to fit the geographical disparities and the pre-existing decentralization legal frameworks.
Leadership and management as a driver for change Ministries of Health need to implement capacity-building programmes in the form of on-site training rather than classical classroom training without clear connection with real-world settings. This encompasses learning to action experiential learning, on-site workshops and collaborative ‘systemic’ leadership development programmes etc.
Internal collaborative dynamics Healthcare managers and officials in charge of the implementation of healthcare networks need to build creative enabling spaces for collaboration between different networks partners. This depends on careful selection and recruitment of healthcare leaders with adaptive leadership abilities and on developing procedural arrangements that protect staff and enable a culture of trial and error instead of blame and sanctions.
Collaborative leadership Ministries of Health need to carefully design the composition of governance bodies of future healthcare networks with sufficient room for incentives for collaboration, teamwork and performance-based contractual arrangements. This will allow the creation of efficient alliances between partners (hospitals and primary healthcare centres) and better implementation of joint collaborative actions. This, in practice, is enabled through appropriate selection of operational leadership actors based on their emotional intelligence, ability to manage power dynamics and inspire trust, and their possession of transformative and distributed leadership abilities.
Collaborative actions, outputs and outcomes In context where the formation of healthcare networks are mandatory, Ministries of Health need to develop in addition quality assurance projects and accreditation processes to ensure improved accountability of healthcare networks and their entities. More emphasis needs to be placed on enhancing the transparency of the internal rule of procedures, budget allocation and communication channels between network members.
Organizational learning and inter-organizational performance Ministries of Health need to transform the process of implementation of healthcare networks into action learning projects with systematic documentation of key organizational processes and key performance indicators.
Adaptive outcomes Ministries of Health and healthcare networks managers might benefit from benchmark trips and workshops to assess inter-organizational innovations implemented in other health regions and to exchange resources across regions, such as through the development of a regional common human resource pool to adapt to increasing changes in medical and nursing density.