Population Health: Governance

How can we organise care in such a way that we optimize experience, quality and costs? What type of governance is needed? And how should healthcare organisations collaborate? These are central questions in this course. In answering them, we depart from a recognition of the impact of three crucial global shifts in health care governance: 1) the change in focus from cure to population health, 2) the increased attention to social determinants of health, and 3) the stronger involvement of non-governmental healthcare organisations in service delivery networks. The course is unique in combining the Population Health perspective with theories of healthcare system governance. It takes a ‘multi-level’ perspective: the participant will look at healthcare governance from different angles in the healthcare system as a whole: from the global and national level, to networks of organisations, to individual care organisations, and finally to the healthcare professional. All these actors should function well to optimize accessible, affordable and high quality of care. To attain these goals, specific managerial network and leadership skills are required.

• Welcome to Population Health: Governance
• Welcome to the course Population Health: Governance! In this module you will get to know what the scope of this course is and you will learn how to be successful at online studying.
• Healthcare shifts in Governance: Systems
• We will start this course by taking a bird’s eye view on healthcare: the perspective of the healthcare system as a whole. You will learn about the different systems that exist in the world, how these systems are shifting, and how well your own country performs compared to other countries in the world.
• Healthcare shifts in Governance: Organisations
• In this module we will descend from a system-level view to individual organisations: how are healthcare organisations managed, and in particular, how can we evaluate their performance? You will learn to answer these questions with the help of governance and organisational theories.
• Healthcare shifts in Governance: Networks
• We have seen the system perspective and the individual perspective on healthcare governance. In this module, we turn our focus to whole networks, or the sum of all the collaborations between healthcare and other collaborations that jointly aim to improve health services. You will learn how to analyse and manage these networks using stakeholder and social network analysis skills.
• Healthcare shifts in Governance: Professionals
• In this final module, we will take the perspective of the healthcare professional. What characterizes their work, and how do they cope with the often stressful tasks they have to perform? And how is their work changing? You will learn what makes the work of healthcare professionals challenging, and how they strategically cope with these challenges.