Previous Conferences

OBHC 2022 Conference – University of Birmingham

The Health Services Management Centre (HSMC; in its 50th year) at the University of Birmingham hosted the 13th Organisational Behaviour in Health Care (OBHC) conference in September 2022. With over 110 delegates from 9 countries, OBHC continued its rich tradition of convening scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore current research relating to the management and organisations of health care across the world.

Over 60 presentations were given in three parallel streams. For the first time, the conference was held in a hybrid format, with 1 stream being live-streamed and all presentations being recorded for (in-person and online) delegates. Two keynote talks were given by Professor Justin Waring and Dame Stella Manzie which challenged existing the theoretical frames and explored the practical implications of research, respectively. The conference continued the tradition of a PhD/ECR workshop, led by Professor Cathy Pope, which prompted new ways of thinking about research facilitated social interaction.

Congratulations to the best paper award winners:

Best Paper Award
Rasa Mikelyte, Jenny Billings, Anna Coleman, Julie MacInnes, Sarah Croke, Pauline Allen, Kath Checkland
“Understanding change in health systems using the Strategic Action Fields Framework: the availability and origin of Sources of Authority”

Highly Commended Paper
Xanthe Townend, Ian Kirkpatrick, Ali Altanlar, Gianluca Veronesi
“‘Strong in the saddle’: the effect of social capital on CEO exit”

Liz West Best PhD Paper Award
Stephanie Ewuzie, Gerry McGivern, Gerardo Patriotta, Daniel Mbuthia, Jacinta Nzinga, Mike English “Moral emotions in professional work: How novices transition from medical professional training to clinical practice”

Best ECR Paper Award
Rachel Gifford, Daan Westra, Frank van de Baan, Dirk Ruwaard, Bram Fleuren
“The reality of essentiality: What turbulent times reveal about the necessity and value of essential work”

Highly Commended ECR Paper
Marieke van Wieringen
“‘They’re lost without us’: Precarious identity work of a low-status occupational group to alter subordination”

Highly Commended ECR Paper
Amalie Martinus Hauge
“Diagnostic layers or allocative categories? – The case of precision medicine for lung cancer”

The conference also launched the edited book from OBHC 2020 (which was cancelled due to the covid-19 pandemic. Details of the book can be found here.

Finally, thanks to the University of Birmingham conference team, to our keynote speakers, to the chairs of the sessions and all the delegate. After the hiatus of covid, we look forward to the 14th OBHC conference in 2024.

OBHC 2020 Conference: Keynote Webinars

The OBHC 2020 conference was sadly cancelled but we are pleased to announce that our keynote speakers have agreed to deliver their keynotes in a virtual format, as Zoom webinars – Prof Ewan Ferlie (27.4.20) and Prof Ann Langley (6.5.20).

Professor Ewan Ferlie, King’s College London

10.00 – 10.50 a.m. BST (British Summer Time) Monday 27th April 2020

“The UK Health Policy Process: Integration, Fragmentation or Pluralisation?”

The talk will explore recent changes in the UK health policy process. It will suggest that the integration / fragmentation binary useful in the analysis of service delivery is not so helpful at this macro level. Here the tension is between narrowly and more broadly scoped policy processes. This tension will be explored in relation to some vignettes of the UK health policy process. It will be concluded that there is evidence of pluralisation, but in a bounded fashion.

Professor Ewan Ferlie, King’s College London

“The UK Health Policy Process …”

The Keynote Slides
The Keynote Recording

Professor Ann Langley, HEC Montreal

‘Between Patients, Professions and Politics: Managerial Agency in Health Care Reform’

In the context of ongoing waves of health care reform, senior managers of health care organizations find themselves at the nexus of top-down political forces demanding policy implementation and bottom-up pressures from powerful professional groups. In addition, they share the responsibility of ensuring high quality health care delivery to users of the health care system. How do managers, as crucial agents at the heart of the health care system engage with and contribute to the enactment of health care reform? Drawing on research findings and practice-based theories, this presentation will explore the implications of the different forms of institutional work that senior managers engage in as they navigate these diverse pressures and influence the shape of reform on the ground.

The Keynote Slides
The Keynote Recording

OBHC 2020 conference: Best Paper Awards

You have invested a lot of time and effort into writing and reviewing papers for the conference, and we thought it would be nice to uphold the OBHC tradition and proceed with OBHC Best Paper awards. We thank our award selection committee – Diane Burns, Sue Dopson, Louise Fitzgerald, Gill Harvey and Justin Waring – for their thorough reading and enthusiastic discussion of shortlisted papers. We are also grateful to Jean-Louis Denis and Mark Exworthy for providing advice and guidance throughout the selection process. This year’s awards are special not only because of the circumstances in which we are announcing the winners. We are also introducing the inaugural Liz West Best PhD Paper Award to pay tribute to the tremendous contribution Professor Liz West made to SHOC/OBHC community and our field of study.

Professor Liz West, longstanding SHOC member and beloved social science researcher, passed away on August 4th, 2018. She was most recently Professor of Applied Social Science at the University of Greenwich, where she was also the Director of the Centre for Positive Ageing, and Head of the Health and Society Research Group. Throughout her career, Liz focused on public health and social inequality, patients’ experiences and evaluation of care, and professional and inter-professional issues. Her research took advantage of large existing datasets, including the British Household Panel Survey, Intensive Care National Audit and Research Data, Care Home and Quality data and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing to address new questions in health policy and health services change, particularly in relation to provision of care for older adults. Liz was passionate about developing and supporting younger scholars, and it is particularly fitting that the award named after her will be given to the best PhD paper submitted to OBHC.

And here are the winners:

OBHC 2020 Highly Commended PhD Paper: Susan Usher, Jean-Louis Denis, Élizabeth Côté-Boileau, Johanne Préval, G. Ross Baker, Samia Chreim “What does it mean to have quality drive healthcare reforms? Ontario’s experience”

OBHC 2020 Highly Commended PhD Paper: Christian P. Kortkamp, Clarissa E. Weber, Indre Maurer “Micro-strategies to enforce competing demands in interprofessional collaboration: The case of geriatric nurses and general practitioners in German nursing homes”

OBHC 2020 Liz West Best PhD Paper: Hanna Carlsson, Roos Pijpers “Crafting outreach and social support services for older migrants: Convergence and divergence in two local landscapes of health and social care in the Netherlands”

OBHC 2020 Highly Commended Paper: Mhorag Goff, Damian Hodgson, Michael Bresnen, Simon Bailey “The ambiguous workaround: Exploring the tensions between stability and change in healthcare innovation”

OBHC 2020 Best Paper: Ian Kirkpatrick, Alessandro Zardini, Gianluca Veronesi “Professional re-stratification and the (defensive) adaptation of status hierarchies: Medical management in English public hospitals”

Please join us in congratulating the winners!

11th Organizational Behaviour in Heath Care (OBHC) Conference

Coordinating Care Across Boundaries and Borders

Sunday, May 13 to Wednesday, May 16, 2018, Montreal, Canada

The 2018 OBHC Conference, the primary activity of the Society for Studies in Organizing Heathcare, was jointly hosted by McGill University (Department of Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Desautels Faculty of Management), l’Université de Montréal (École de Santé Publique), and HEC Montréal (Le Pôle santé). The conference took place in the heart of this charming city, at the Centre Mont-Royal.

Prestigious Guest Speakers:

Samia Chreim, University of Ottawa

Scott Garrison, University of Alberta

Pascale Lehoux, l’Université de Montréal

Henry Mintzberg, McGill University (to be confirmed)

Vinh-­‐Kim Nguyen, l’Université de Montréal

Davide Nicolini, University of Warwick

Stephen Peckham, University of Kent / LSHTM

Trish Reay, University of Alberta

Eric C. Schneider, The Commonwealth Fund, USA

Daniel Weinstock, McGill University

The 10th International Organisational Behaviour in Healthcare Conference was held at Cardiff Business School on 4th-6th April 2016. The Conference theme was ‘Attaining, sustaining and spreading improvement: Art or Science?’. It was hosted by Cardiff Health Organisation and Policy Studies Group (CHOPS), Cardiff Business School.

Professor Martin Kitchener, Dr. Aoife McDermott, and the whole team delivered a highly successful conference. The conference was a wonderful demonstration of the vibrancy and vitality of our community of practice. It was also a real showcase of the City of Cardiff, ancient and modern, with the conference itself held in the fabulous new premises of the Business School and social events in the splendour of Cardiff Castle and dinner in the National Museum.

A summary of the 10th OBHC conference:
18 countries represented
52 reviewers of conference papers
86 sessions
35 participants in the pre-conference event for PhD and early career researchers
15 Health Foundation bursaries for PhD and early career researchers. The calibre was so high, Cardiff Business School made provision for support of a further 9 individuals
5 symposia, the first time these were included in the programme
3 keynotes speakers:
• Mark Drakeford, Minister for Health and Social Services in the Welsh government
• Professor Steve Shortell, University of Berkeley, USA
• Professor Louise Fitzgerald, Oxford University / De Montfort University
• An innovation of this year’s conference was the pre-conference workshop for PhD students and early career researchers. By giving a focus to this research, the workshop not only aims to enhance the rigour of the research but foster a new community of researchers.
• The conference recognised the enormous contribution to SHOC by Professor Lorna McKee over many years.

Awards were given to the following:
Best papers by an Early Career Researcher:
• Comfort Adeosun (University of Aberdeen), with McKee L.,Homans H. & Rae R. “Stakeholder involvement and service user’s acceptance in the implementation of new practice guideline”
• Joy Furnival University of Manchester), with Walshe K. & Boaden R. “Emerging hybridity: A comparative analysis of regulatory arrangements in the four countries of the United Kingdom”
Highly Commended PhD paper:
• Dori Cross (University of Michigan). “Contextual factors influencing success of primary care teams: A scoping review”
Highly commended papers:
• Julie E. Reed (Imperial College, London) and Heather C. Kaplan (Cincinnati Children’s Hospital). “Qualitative exploration of context using the Model for Understanding Success in Quality (MUSIQ)”
• Gerry McGivern (Warwick Business School), Michael Fischer (University of Melbourne), Justin Waring (University of Nottingham), Tomas Palaima (Vilnius University), Zoey Spendlove (Warwick Business School), Oliver Thomson (British School of Osteopathy) and Tina Kiefer (Warwick Business School). “Improving health care through relational regulation: The case of UK osteopathy.”
Best paper:
• Justin Waring and Amanda Crompton (University of Nottingham). “A movement for improvement? Leading and framing the implementation of collaborative change.”

The 9th International Organisational Behaviour in Healthcare Conference, ‘When Health Policy Meets Every Day Practices’, was hosted at Copenhagen Business School by CBS Public-Private Platform in Denmark, on 23-25th April 2014. This was the first OB in HC conference to be held in Northern Europe. The conference was a great success with over 100 attendees coming from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, UK, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, the US, Canada and Australia.

Our 8th International Organisation Behaviour in Healthcare Conference
15 – 17 April 2012
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Theme:
Patient centred health care teams:
Achieving collaboration, communication and care.

The Conference explored how healthcare organisations and professions can work towards achieving patient-centred healthcare. A broad range of contributions were received, including those addressing themes of teamwork, networks, communication, collaboration and care.

Previous conferences with associated publications have been held at:

University of Birmingham, U.K. 2010

The book from this conference is entitled-

Dickinson, H. & Mannion, R. (2011) The Reform of Healthcare-Shaping, adapting and resisting policy developments, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia 2008

The book from this conference is entitled-

Braithwaite, J.; Hyde, P. and Pope, C. (2010) Culture & Climate: cracking the code, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Plus we produced two special edition journals.

Aberdeen University, Scotland, 2006

The book from this conference is entitled-

McKee, L.; Ferlie, E. and Hyde, P. (2008) Organizing and Reorganizing: Power and Change in Health Care Organizations, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Fitzgerald, L.; Mark, A. L. & McKee, L. (2007) Guest Editors for a double special edition on Power and People in the Journal of Health Organization and Management.21(4/5) 353-357.

OBHC in Calgary, Canada, 2004

Casebeer, A.; Harrison, A. & Mark, A.L. (ed.s) (2006) Innovations in Healthcare – a reality check; London, Palgrave Macmillan. isbn 1403947481

OBHC in Oxford, 2002

Dopson, S. & Mark, A.L. (ed.s) (2003) Leading healthcare organizations; London, Palgrave Macmillan. isbn 1403902704

OBHC in Keele, 2000

Ashburner, L. (ed.) (2001) Organisational Behaviour and Organisational studies in healthcare – reflections on the future; London, Palgrave Macmillan. isbn 0333947703

OBHC in Middlesex, 1998

Mark, A.L. & Dopson, S. (ed.s) (1999) Organisational Behaviour in Healthcare – the research agenda; Macmillan Business. isbn 0333 745558

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