Les pratiques stratégiques des infirmières dans les réseaux intégrés de services de santé

The integration of healthcare and services is perceived equally by the decision makers, by the professionals and by the users, as a necessity to ensure a better accessibility, to promote continuity and coordination and to improve the quality of these care and services, while controlling the costs. About two decades ago, the integrated healthcare and services networks have been developing in the countries of the OECD. This phenomenon has generated a broad quantity of literature concerning the organizational conditions supporting the integration of healthcare and more recently, on the importance of the role and the position of the professionals within these structures. The empirical data and the writings have been highlighting that the nurses have played an important part in the setting of the integrated healthcare and services networks since their beginning. This study’s goal is to identify the strategic practices of nurses that are involved in the integrated healthcare and services networks and to understand how those practices promote the organizational learning that allow adjustments of practices of all the contributors in the integration of services. It also aims to put forward the individual and organizational factors involved in the development of those practices and in the organizational learning process. Literature reviews on integrated services networks, clinical integration, organizational learning and strategic analysis confirmed that these writings, while being complementary, supported the objectives of this study. Indeed, the writings on the integration present determinants of the integration without approaching the strategic practices and while being discrete on the organizational learning. Literature on organizational learning fails to describe the practices that promote the organizational learning and are not talkative on the factors that influence the organizational learning. Finally, literature on the strategic analysis discusses the systems and the dynamic processes including the individual and organizational conditions, but they don’t refer to organizational learning. To discover the strategic practices and the organizational learning and to understand the learning process and its factors, we used multiple case studies as our research strategy. We studied the practices of nurses evolving in four situations aiming the clinical integration. Those situations were taking part of three healthcare and services networks involving professionals from different disciplines attached to either a hospital or to a local community services center. Three case studies have been written from the information arising from different data bases. Through this study, four data bases were used: individual interviews with nurses, other professionals and managers (n=60), group interviews (n=3), observation sessions (n=12) and the study of archive documents (n=96). With the empirical data collected we were able to discover fifteen strategic practices and to precise the nature of the learning they generated. The analysis of the cases also allowed us to better understand the link between the strategic practices and the organizational learning and to bring precisions on the organizational learning process. This study is concluded by a discussion on the integrated organizational learning model and on its applications in research as well as in practice. This study contributes to practice and to research by offering an integrated organizational learning model on top of specifying that the organizational learning process is propelled by learning cycles which are stimulated by strategic practices. It also clarifies that strategic practices take place because of the nurses’ individual resources and the organizational factors. Finally, the study demonstrates that organizational learning encourages a change in the practices supporting clinical integration.

Keyphrases: Healthcare integration, Organizational learning, Strategic analysis, Professional practices, Case study, Nurses