Aim

The aim is to work together with healthcare organizations, and together create, transform and diffuse research-based and action-oriented knowledge. This way, CHI also wants to contribute to professional development within the healthcare sector’s management and development.

Our ambition is to act as a regional, national and international idea cluster for research and education in improvement, innovation and transformation of the healthcare sector. To reach this goal, CHI focuses on two parts – research and education.

Cooperation through Research

Research at CHI is strongly characterized by action research. As a result, we do not make any great distinction between research and development. Instead we prefer to carry out research by taking part in or running development projects in cooperation with healthcare organizations. Research is therefore carried out with, instead of within, the organizations involved.

We have a number of different research projects within CHI. In many of them a central basis and common denominator is to find forms for successful improvement work towards a more patient-orientated, efficient and safe medical service. Basically all projects are cross-disciplinary and are proof of local “translation bridges” between engineering know-how/industrial experiences and care/medical competence.

We always work close to healthcare organizations and meet the practical problems through experiential learning in our courses and with an action research approach in our research. Some important points for us are, for example:

• Guiding principles for organizing, patient focus, continuous improvement, flow orientation, coordination, integrated care
• Improvement knowledge: knowledge about variation, understanding of systems, theory of knowledge, the psychology of change
• Sustainable development: social, economic, ecological but also from the care process, ie. a clinical perspective
• "Translations" of knowledge, from industry to healthcare and vice versa
• Action research, experiential learning

Cooperation through Education

CHI is running a number of courses at the Master’s level (from 7.5 to 30 credits) for quality managers, healthcare leaders, and physicians in their specialist training. The education principle is that of experiential learning – participants have to perform improvement activities in their own organizations as a basis for reflection and learning new concepts and ideas.

CHI has now educated more than 430 healthcare professionals in quality management and improvement work. Example of courses:

• Quality driven organizational development (30 credits)
• Improvement knowledge for healthcare leaders (7.5 credits)
• Advanced Improvement Knowledge in a Healthcare Setting (30 credits)
• Improvement Knowledge on scientific ground for residents (7.5 credits)
• Lean Healthcare (7.5 credits); Six Sigma Black Belt (15 credits)
• Reflexive Action Research for PhD Students (7.5 credits)

More about CHI

CHI is led by a director, Patrik Alexandersson, together with 2 scientific leaders - Andreas Hellström and Svante Lifvergren. Andreas works as a senior lecturer in the Division of Quality Sciences and Svante is a senior physician and works as a development director at the Skaraborg Hospital Group (SkaS).