Samverkan i en digital tid : Deltagares upplevelser och erfarenheter av tvärsektoriellt samverkansarbete i utveckling av en digital lösning i vården

Sammanfattning

Demographic trends are challenging social welfare in Europe. To be able to offer effective social care and health care and meet the population's needs, requirements and expectations, a transition to Good quality, local health care is required. Digitalization and welfare technology are highlighted as important complements to be able to meet the social welfare challenges, but for digital solutions to be used and useful, they must meet the needs of users. Introducing new innovations into a complex system is also a very complicated processes, and nothing that individual actors can do on their own. In realizing the transition to Good quality, local health care to be implemented, cross-sectoral collaboration between different actors is needed. All actors in the society need to break new ground and together explore new, innovative ways of offering welfare services. The purpose was to describe participants' experiences of cross-sectoral collaboration between the municipality, region and supplier in the development of a digital solution in healthcare. The study was conducted through a participant-based approach, a so-called action research approach. The study context was a collaborative project / R&D- program that involved five workshops with cross-sectoral representation of strategically selected participants. An inductive qualitative research approach was used to gain an in-depth understanding of the experiences of the collaboration work. The data collection consisted of nine individual interviews. Through thematic analysis, three themes and ten subthemes were identified. The result suggests that there are great similarities between cross-sectoral collaboration work and usual teamwork, but that cross-sectoral collaboration probably requires more, possibly based on its need for an interprofessional composition of people from different areas and its special focus on the development of new innovations. The analysis shows that the three themes relate to each other in a certain order, in a linear movement, which is about creating the conditions before the collaboration work, collaborating in partnership, and accelerating the joint work from collaboration to action-oriented co-creation. Furthermore, the analysis shows that there seem to be common intersections, both among the three themes, and for all of them together. From that perspective, it can be assumed that that all three themes should be included for the work to lead to expected delivery. More knowledge is needed about how different actors of society can work together in the development of digital solutions. There is also a need for more research on how national governance, laws and regulations affect this type of collaborative work and what would be needed to facilitate and enable collaborative work in the digital transformation. Keywords: cross-sectoral collaboration, digitalization, health and welfare, qualitative study, welfare technology