A Gateway Framework to Guide Major Health System Changes; Comment on “‘Attending to History’ in Major System Change in Healthcare in England: Specialist Cancer Surgery Service Reconfiguration”

Abstract

Recent events – on both a global scale and within individual countries – including the lockdowns associated with COVID-19 pandemic, inflation concerns, and political tensions, have increased pressure to reconfigure social services for ongoing sustainability. Healthcare services across the world are undergoing major system change (MSC). Given the complexity and different contextual drivers across healthcare systems, there is a need to use a variety of perspectives to improve our understanding of the processes for MSC. To expand the knowledge base and develop strategies for MSC requires analysing change projects from different perspectives to distil the elements that drove the success. We offer the Gateway Framework as a collaborative transformational system tool to assess and reorganise operations, services, and systems of healthcare organisations. This framework and guiding questions, accounts for past events whilst being proactive, future orientated, and derived from externally defined and a standardised requirements to promote safe, high-quality care.

Keywords

• major system change
• restructuring
• health systems
• healthcare safety
• healthcare quality