Research and impact
The research activity of the Graduate School of Healthcare Management is directed at tackling grand challenges and complex problems in health and care. Our research is funded by organisations including World Health Organization, the Health Research Board and the Health Services Executive. We collaborate nationally and internationally to transform health and healthcare delivery with partners such as the Department of Health, regional hospital groups, individual organisations and academic colleagues around the globe.
Our aim is to support healthcare professionals through high quality education and research to enable people to live long and healthy lives. That means undertaking research that matters; ensuring the latest research is embedded in our teaching, and; providing our Postgraduates with the opportunity to create and apply new knowledge to their own work contexts as part of a drive to improve healthcare systems. Our mission can be summarised as:
- To develop cutting-edge research that leads debates, challenges preconceptions, addresses ethical concerns, improves systems, and supports healthcare management and healthcare organisations.
- To nurture cultures of discovery across interdisciplinary, institutional and international boundaries as part of collaborative approaches to grand challenges and complex problems
- To positively impact healthcare management through contextually sensitive research, teaching, training and organisational development in partnership with stakeholders.
In meeting this mission our research, scholarship and impact activity is organised around three overarching themes.
How do we ensure effective healthcare delivery? What does it take to improve quality or measure risk and create safer healthcare services? What does it mean to lead better health? How can stakeholders come together to improve healthcare systems and tackle complex problems? These are some of the questions tackled in the Quality, Leadership and Systems theme.
Our research – and that of our postgraduate students – is aimed at supporting systemic improvements in healthcare with particular emphasis on safety cultures, quality improvement, clinical leadership, workforce planning, governance and service reform. It seeks to inform national and international policy with a view to driving improvement and shaping change. It also informs our programmes on management, quality, human resources and leadership.
The global pandemic has caused many of us to focus on the nature of work, empowerment and well-being, but what does well-being mean in organisational terms? How do we empower workers, managers, leaders and users to improve health and healthcare? How might we measure health and well-being at the level of individuals, organisations and at a national level? What is it like to work in difficult contexts and who has responsibility for ensuring that health workers are adequately supported to cope with events like the pandemic?
Answers to these issues are explored through: our in-depth health workforce research, service evaluations, publications and executive education covering areas such as: positive psychology, professionalism, health workforce planning, worker welfare, collaboration, ethics, restorative justice, emotion, stress, power and marginality.
Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Digital Disruption are crucial to the field of healthcare globally. We open avenues in how to lead entrepreneurship, innovation, and design thinking in healthcare as well as how to achieve results with a future oriented mindset. Visionary in our approach, our research examines both internal and external healthcare environments, addressing the key elements such as organizational strategy, culture and structure to overcome complexity and drive innovation. We provide a thought-provoking analysis on the significant global challenges experienced within healthcare, including the COVID-19 pandemic. We drive the vision that accomplishes the imaginable to make it happen – and keep it happening.