Building sustainable hospitals: A resource interaction perspective

In response to a growing influence of patients, higher specialisation, technological advancement and the need to provide care services more efficiently, the issue of sustainability in healthcare has gained prominence. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the social and economic sustainability of healthcare are dependent on interconnecting resources across organisational borders and in different settings over time. Adopting a product development process perspective, the paper explores the gap between a planned healthcare facility and how it actually came to be used, through a longitudinal case study of the Skandion clinic, a small, highly specialised, hospital in Sweden. The findings suggests that integration of healthcare resources over time is central to achieve social and economic sustainability goals. The results hereby contend the prevailing view of hospitals as independent organisational units and highlights the need for more holistic analyses of sustainability in healthcare. Analyses which take into account the complex interdependencies stretching across networks of interconnected facilities and organisational units

New ways of organising construction due to user demands

This paper investigates how client demands affect organisational renewal in construction, more specifically how the combining of technical and organisational resources are directly and indirectly affected by demands from the user. We adopt an industrial network perspective and focus on inter-organisational interaction between the actors involved in two specific healthcare construction projects in Sweden. The findings show that user demands affect organisational renewal with regard to both onsite and off-site operations and that effects due to user demands can be spread outside the \u27temporary\u27 network to the \u27permanent\u27 network. Hence, user demands create direct and indirect effects on both the combining of organisational and technical resources across individual projects and organisational boundaries. These findings imply that in order to understand innovation in construction it is necessary to study how technical and organisational resources are combined across organisational boundaries and across projects