For better or worse: Governing healthcare organisations in times of financial distress.

Due to processes of financialisation, financial parties increasingly penetrate the healthcare domain and determine under which conditions care is delivered. Their influence becomes especially visible when healthcare organisations face financial distress. By zooming-in on two of such cases, we come to know more about the considerations, motives and actions of financial parties in healthcare. In this research, we were able to examine the social dynamics between healthcare executives, banks and health insurers involved in a Dutch hospital and mental healthcare organisation on the verge of bankruptcy. Informed by interviews, document analysis and translation theory, we reconstructed the motives and strategies of executives, banks and health insurers and show how they play a crucial role in decision-making processes surrounding the survival or downfall of healthcare organisations. While parties are bound by legislation and company procedures, the outcome of financial distress can still be influenced. Much depends on how executives are perceived by financial stakeholders and how they deal with threats of destabilisation of the network. We further draw attention to the consequences of financialisation processes on the practices of healthcare organisations in financial distress.

Job crafting as retention strategy: An ethnographic account of the challenges faced in crafting new nursing roles in care practice.

Nursing shortages in the global north are soaring. Of particular concern is the high turnover among bachelor-trained nurses. Nurses tend to leave the profession shortly after graduating, often citing a lack of appreciation and voice in clinical and organisational decision-making. Healthcare organisations seek to increase the sustainability of the nursing workforce by enhancing nursing roles and nurses' organisational positions. In the Netherlands, hospitals have introduced pilots in which nurses craft new roles. We followed two pilots ethnographically and examined how nurses and managers shaped new nursing roles and made sense of their (expected) impact on workforce resilience. Informed by the literature on professional ecologies and job crafting, we show how managers and nurses defined new roles by differentiating between training levels and the uptake of care-related organisational responsibilities beyond the traditional nursing role. We also show how, when embedding such new roles, nurses needed to negotiate specific challenges associated with everyday nursing practice, manifested in distinct modes of organising, work rhythms, embodied expertise, socio-material arrangements, interprofessional relationships, and conventions about what is considered important in nursing. We argue that our in-depth case study provides a relational and socio-material understanding of the organisational politics implicated in organising care work in the face of workforce shortages.

Five pathways into one profession: Fifty years of debate on differentiated nursing practice.

The persistence of multiple educational pathways into the nursing profession continues to occupy scholars internationally. In the Netherlands, various groups within the Dutch healthcare sector have tried to differentiate nursing practice on the basis of educational backgrounds for over 50 years. Proponents argue that such reforms are needed to retain bachelor-trained nurses, improve quality of care and strengthen nurses' position in the sector. Opponents have actively resisted reforms because they would mainly benefit bachelor-trained nurses and neglect practical experience and technical skills. This historical case study aims to provide insight in this apparent stalemate. Our analysis of this debate is informed by literature on institutional work and current debates within the historiography of nursing. This study contributes to a better understanding of this contemporary debate by examining a broader timeframe than is usually studied, and by highlighting nurses' roles in complex processes of change. We argue that, rather than being stuck in their professional development, different groups of nurses have forged their own path forward in their professional development, albeit via different strategies.

Assembling care: How nurses organise care in uncharted territory and in times of pandemic.

This article draws on ethnographic research to conceptualise how nurses mobilise assemblages of caring to organise and deliver COVID care; particularly so by reorganising organisational infrastructures and practices of safe and good care. Based on participatory observations, interviews and nurse diaries, all collected during the early phase of the pandemic, the research shows how the organising work of nurses unfolds at different health-care layers: in the daily care for patients and their families, in the coordination of care in and between hospitals, and at the level of the health-care system. These findings contrast with the dominant pandemic-image of nurses as 'heroes at the bedside', which fosters the classic and microlevel view of nursing and leaves the broader contribution of nurses to the pandemic unaddressed. Theoretically, the study adds to the literature on translational mobilisation and assemblage theory by focussing on the layered and often invisible organising work of nurses in health care.

"We don't experiment with our patients!" An ethnographic account of the epistemic politics of (re)designing nursing work.

This article draws on ethnographic research investigating experimental reform projects in local nursing practices. These are aimed at strengthening nursing work and fostering nurses' position within healthcare through bottom-up nurse-driven innovations. Based on literature on epistemic politics and critical nursing studies, the study examines and conceptualizes how these nurses promote professional and organizational change. The research draws on data from two pilot projects to show how epistemic politics frame the production and use of knowledge within reform efforts. The study finds that knowledge produced through such experimenting is often not considered valid within the contexts of broader organizational transitions. The nurse-driven innovations fail to meet established legitimate criteria for informing change, both among stakeholders in the nurses' socio-political environment, as well as within the nursing community. The research reveals that the processes inadvertently reinforce normative knowledge hierarchies, perpetuating forms of epistemic injustice, limiting both nurses' ability to function as change agents and healthcare organizations' capacity to learn.

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.

Taking the Relationship Between Populism and Healthcare Seriously: A Call for Empirical Analysis Rather Than Moral Condemnation Comment on "A Scoping Review of Populist Radical Right Parties' Influence on Welfare Policy and its Implications for Population Health in Europe".

In this commentary, we reflect on Rinaldi and Bekker's scoping review of the literature on populist radical right (PRR) parties and welfare policies. We argue that their review provides political scientists and healthcare scholars with a firm basis to further explore the relationships between populism and welfare policies in different political systems. In line with the authors, we furthermore (re)emphasize the need for additional empirical inquiries into the relationship between populism and healthcare. But instead of expanding the research agenda suggested - for instance by adding categories or niches in which this relationship can be observed - we would like to challenge some of the premises of the studies conducted and reviewed thus far. We do so by identifying two concerns and by illustrating these concerns with two examples from the Netherlands.

Who contextualises clinical epidemiological evidence? A political analysis of the problem of evidence-based medicine in the layered Dutch healthcare system.

We critically examine the discussion on the role of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in healthcare governance. We take the institutionally layered Dutch healthcare system as our case study. Here, different actors are involved in the regulation, provision and financing of healthcare services. Over the last decades, these actors have related to EBM to inform their actor specific roles. At the same time, EBM has increasingly been problematised. To better understand this problematisation, we organised focus groups and interviews. We noticed that particularly EBM's reductionist epistemology and its uncritical use by 'professional others' are considered problematic. However, our analysis also reveals that something else seems to be at stake. In fact, all the actors involved underwrite EBM's reductionist epistemology and emphasise that evidence should be contextualised. They however do so in different ways and with different contexts in mind. Moreover, the ways in which some actors contextualise evidence has consequences for the ways in which others can do the same. We therefore emphasise that behind EBM's scientific problematisation lurks a political issue. A dispute over who should contextualise evidence how, in a layered healthcare system with interdependent actors that cater to both individual patients and the public. We urge public administration scholars and policymakers to open-up the political confrontation between healthcare actors and their sometimes irreconcilable, yet evidence-informed perspectives.

Politics of policy learning: Evaluating an experiment on free pricing arrangements in Dutch dental care.

In Dutch healthcare, new market mechanisms have been introduced on an experimental basis in an attempt to contain costs and improve quality. Informed by a constructivist approach, we demonstrate that such experiments are not neutral testing grounds. Drawing from semi-structured interviews and policy texts, we reconstruct an experiment on free pricing in dental care that turned into a critical example of market failure, influencing developments in other sectors. Our analysis, however, shows that (1) different market logics and (2) different experimental logics were reproduced simultaneously during the course of the experiment. We furthermore reveal how (3) evaluation and political life influenced which logics were reproduced and became taken as the lessons learned. We use these insights to discuss the role of evaluation in learning from policy experimentation and close with four questions that evaluators could ask to better understand what is learned from policy experiments, how, and why.