Triage as an infrastructure of care: The intimate work of redistributing medical care in nursing homes.

This article explores how professionals in older persons care work on a triage system in the daily care setting. We follow how triage is introduced in older persons care organizations in The Netherlands, to deal with a scarcity of physicians and distribute care among health workers in the region. We offer a sociological analysis in which we use the notion of infrastructure and infrastructural work to study how professionals work with triage in the daily care setting. This study is based on a formative evaluation in which we as researchers both studied and contributed to the construction of the triage system by sharing and participating in reflexive infrastructural work practices. We show how this method enabled to gradually adjust the triage system to the daily practices of care delivery, taking the spatial-temporal setting of care into account. We argue that triage not only structures and simplifies but also opens up new ways of re-placing medical and care work, both professionally and geographically. As our results reveal, re-placing physicians has complex effects above and beyond the efficient deployment of medical staff. Triage as infrastructure not only changes the location, but also reconfigures the relationships physicians have with residents and nurse aids.

'The night is for sleeping': how nurses care for conflicting temporal orders in older person care.

This paper examines the conflicting temporal orders of the regional nurse, a role which has been introduced to deal with the increasing demands of aged care and workforce shortages in regional settings. We build on ethnographic research in the Netherlands, in which we examine regional district nurses as a new professional role that attends to (sub)acute care needs, connecting and coordinating different places of care during out of office hours. We use the concept of 'temporal regional order' to reflect on the different ways caring practices are temporally structured by management and care practitioners, in close interaction with patients and informal care givers. In the results three types of disruptions of the regional temporal order are distinguished: interfering bodily rhythms and needs; (un)expected workings of technologies; and disrupting acts of patient and relatives. It was region nurses' prime responsibility to stabilise these interferences and prevent or soften a disruption of the regional order. In accomplishing this, we show how nurses craft their professional role in between various care settings, without getting involved too much in patient care, to be mobile as 'temporal caregivers'.

Bedside Politics and Precarious Care: New Directions of Inquiry in Critical Nursing Studies.

Health care systems are facing soaring workforce shortages, challenging their ability to secure timely access to good-quality care. In this context, nurses make difficult decisions about which patients to deliver care to, transfer to other providers, or strategically ignore. Yet, we still know little about how nurses engage in situated practices of bedside rationing. Building on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler, we have developed a research agenda that homes in on a politics of bedside rationing. We argue that this agenda is essential to better understand the implications of scarcity for nursing and to explore new ways to cope with challenges faced.

Creativity at the margins: A cross-country case study on how Dutch and Norwegian peripheries address challenges to quality work in care for older persons.

BACKGROUND: Peripheral areas are often overlooked in health-care research but they in fact deserve specific attention. Such areas struggle to maintain access to good quality health-care services due to their geographical context. At the same time, new interventions or promising innovations often emerge in places where creativity is urgently needed. In this paper, we explore this creativity at the margins in older persons care organizations in peripheral areas, which other healthcare providers and policymakers can learn from. METHODS: This exploratory study is based on two large research projects on the quality of care for older persons in Norway and the Netherlands. We performed secondary analysis of interviews with quality managers and other quality workers and used additional document analysis and expert interviews to deepen our analysis. RESULTS: The results show that older persons care organizations working in peripheral areas must deal with a number of challenges caused by their geographical context, e.g. geographical distances (between services and to the geographical center), workforce shortages, and landscape characteristics. We found that organizations use different strategies to tackle these challenges, such as scaling up, brightening up and opening up. These strategies, conceptualized as creativity at the margins, impact quality work in different ways, for example by enabling more person-centered care. CONCLUSION: We conclude that both policymakers and research should overcome their peripheral blindness by learning from and supporting creativity at the margins in future policies and research.

Regionalization in elderly care: what makes up a healthcare region?

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to explore the formation and composition of "regions" as places of care, both empirically and conceptually. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This paper draws on action-oriented research involving experiments aimed at designing, implementing and evaluating promising solutions to the entwined problems of a burgeoning elderly population and an increasing shortage of medical staff. It draws on ethnographic research conducted in 14 administrative areas in the Netherlands, a total of 273 in-depth interviews and over 1,000 h of observations. FINDINGS: This research challenges the understanding of a healthcare region as a clearly bounded topological area. It shows that organizations and professionals collaborate in a variety of different networks, some conterminous with the administrative region established by policymakers and others not. These networks are by nature unstable and dynamic. Attempts to form new regional collaborations with neighbouring organizations are complicated by existing healthcare governance and accountability structures that position organizations as competitors. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: Policymakers should take the pre-established partnerships of healthcare organizations into account before delineating the area in which regionalization is meant to take place. A better alignment of governance and accountability structures is also needed for regionalization to occur in healthcare. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This paper combines insights from valuation studies with sociogeographical literature and provides a framework for understanding the assembling and disassembling of "regions".