Boundary-spanning in academic healthcare organisations

C2E2's Post-doctoral fellow, Bryn Lander, has had her article "Boundary-spanning in Academic Healthcare Organizations" published in the journal Research Policy

The abstract and key highlights of the article are below:
Policy makers view academic healthcare organisations as important to healthcare innovation because they act as boundary-spanning organisations that integrate science and care institutional logics. Institutional logics are implicit and socially shared rules of the game that prescribe behaviour within a social group. This paper explores how individuals affiliated with academic healthcare organisations negotiate science and care institutional logics within their day-to-day work through a qualitative case study of research and healthcare within academic healthcare organisations in Vancouver, Canada. It highlights that there is less hybridisation of institutional logics than policy makers might hope: some researchers hosted in academic healthcare organisations are not part of the care institutional logic, others are not well integrated with the research institutional logic, clinician-scientists often struggle to integrate the science and care institutional logics in their day-to-day work, other workers do integrate science and care institutional logics through experiments of nature but their research may not be viewed as high quality science. Because of poor hybridisation, academic healthcare organisations may not be as effective in facilitating healthcare innovation as policy makers assume.

•  Academic healthcare organisations can integrate science and care for healthcare innovation.
•  I explore how workers in academic healthcare organisations integrate science and care.
•  Their work often does not integrate science and care effectively.
•  Academic healthcare organisations may not facilitate innovation as efficiently as assumed.

The article can be found here.

Dr. Bryn Lander is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation, Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, and Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication. Her research interests explore the interface between biomedical research and application and build off of a series of research projects that explored knowledge translation. These included a case study of two clinician-scientists; an exploration of regenerative medicine research and development activities in India; and an investigation of collaboration between individuals working on infection and immunity research and development in universities, hospitals, government, NGOs, and firms.