Primary Care Reform in Ireland – An analysis of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ innovation

Lead Researcher:

Prof Anne MacFarlane

Award Date:

1 January 2013

Host Institution:

University of Limerick

Scheme:

Health Research Award

Summary:

Primary care focuses on care for people and their families in the community. Internationally, it is considered ideal to have primary care professionals from a variety of backgrounds working together as a team to provide co-ordinated and continuing care to those who need it. However, this remains an elusive goal in Ireland. Why is this? Research has shown that it is very challenging for health professionals from different backgrounds to work together in a meaningful and manageable way when their identities, expertise and organisational demands are very different from each other. However, there is surprisingly little research in Ireland or abroad about how health professionals try and implement team working into their day to day routines. What work do they have to do individually and together to make primary care team working a reality? Sociologists are interested in studying this implementation work and have developed a theory called Normalisation Process Theory to understand the factors make a complex new way of working, such as primary care team working, easy or difficult to achieve. In our research, we will use this theory to explore and understand what progress has been made in Ireland to implement primary care teams. We will also explore what other kinds of innovation have been developed in primary care settings and we will compare the progress of their implementation with the progress of implementing Primary Care Teams. This will provide valuable data about implementation of Primary Care Teams for national and international settings and important evidence for policy makers and health service planners to reconfigure the Irish primary care service in the future.