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Robots are projected to affect healthcare services in significant, but unpredictable, ways. Many believe robots will add value to future healthcare, but their arrival has triggered controversy. Debates revolve around how robotics will impact healthcare provision, their effects on the future of labor and caregiver–patient relationships, and ethical dilemmas associated with autonomous machines. This study investigates media representations of healthcare robotics in Norway over a twenty-year period, using a mixed-methods design. Media representations affect public opinion in multiple ways. By assembling and presenting information through stories, they not only set the agenda by broadcasting values, experiences, and expectations about new technologies, but also frame and prime specific understandings of issues. First, we employ an inductive text-mining approach known as "topic modeling," a computational method for eliciting abstract semantic structures from large text corpora. Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, we implement a topic model of manifest content from 752 articles, published in Norwegian print media between 1.1.2000 and 2.10.2020, sampled from a comprehensive database for news media (Atekst, Retriever). We complement this computational lens with a more fine-grained, qualitative analysis of content in exemplary texts sampled from each topic. Here, we identify prominent "frames," discursive cues for interpreting how various stakeholders talk about healthcare robotics as a contested domain of policy and practice in a comprehensive welfare state. We also highlight some benefits of this approach for analyzing media discourse and stakeholder perspectives on controversial technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Theoretical knowledge and clinical placement are the main components of nursing education. There are a number of studies that have focused on students' assessments of theory and clinical placement in nursing education. Few studies have focused on the significance of theory and clinical placement courses for nursing students' professional competence after completing their nursing education. Objective: The study aimed to examine nursing students' assessments of theory and clinical placement courses and their self-reported nursing competence. It also aimed to look more closely at the significance of theoretical knowledge and clinical placement for students' nursing competence. Method: This is a cross-sectional study of nursing students at an educational institution in Norway who completed their education in 2019. The data were collected using an online questionnaire. Nursing competence was measured using the Nurse Professional Competence Scale Short Form $NPC Scale--SF%. The response rate was 63%. Results: In terms of preparing them for the nursing profession, nursing students attribute statistically significant greater importance to clinical placement than theory courses in their education. The students have high scores in all competence areas, but score highest in the competence area 'Value-based nursing care' and lowest in 'Development, leadership and organisation of nursing care'. The analysis shows a correlation between students' assessments of theory and clinical placement courses and several of the nursing competence areas. Theory courses have somewhat greater significance for nursing competence than clinical placement courses. Conclusion: The study shows that students consider clinical placement courses to be the most important for their future nursing career. It also shows that theory courses have a somewhat greater significance for students' nursing competence than clinical placement courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nordic Nursing Research / Nordisk Sygeplejeforskning is the property of H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard) AS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: First-line nurse managers are frequently torn between conflicting demands from management and employees, and previous research suggests that nurse managers use a variety of responses to cope with these demands. The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of social support on nurse managers' responses to role-conflict. Design/methodology/approach: Two focused ethnographic studies involving participant observation and interviews with seven first-line nurse managers were completed. One study included first-line nurse managers from four units in two municipalities (2005), while the second included three first-line nurse managers from a hospital in Norway (2015-2016). Findings: Three types of responses were identified: the embracing managerialism career, the emphasising managerialism career and the emphasising professionalism career. Emphasising managerialism was associated with role distance from the role of nurse, whereas emphasising professionalism involved role distance from the managerial role. Originality/value: This study provides insights into first-line nurse managers' responses to role conflict, by identifying the mechanisms involved and an opportunity to develop a theoretical framework for future studies among nurse managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nordic Nursing Research / Nordisk Sygeplejeforskning is the property of H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard) AS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose Partnership working across health and social care is considered key to manage rising service demand whilst ensuring flexible and high-quality services. Evidence suggests that partnership working is a local concern and that wider structural context is important to sustain and direct local collaboration. “Top down” needs to create space for “bottom up” management of local contingency. Scotland and Norway have recently introduced “top down” structural reforms for mandatory partnerships. The purpose of this paper is to describe and compare these policies to consider the extent to which top-down approaches can facilitate effective partnerships that deliver on key goals.Design/methodology/approach The authors compare Scottish (2015) and Norwegian (2012) reforms against the evidence of partnership working. The authors foreground the extent to which organisation, finance and performance management create room for partnerships to work collaboratively and in new ways.Findings The two reforms are held in place by different health and social care organisation and governance arrangements. Room for manoeuvre at local levels has been jeopardised in both countries, but in different ways, mirroring existing structural challenges to partnership working. Known impact of the reforms hitherto suggests that the potential of partnerships to facilitate user-centred care may be compromised by an agenda of reducing pressure on hospital resources.Originality/value Large-scale reforms risk losing sight of user outcomes. Making room for collaboration between user and services in delivering desired outcomes at individual and local levels is an incremental way to join bottom up to top down in partnership policy, retaining the necessary flexibility and involving key constituencies along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Norwegian Journal of Clinical Nursing / Sykepleien Forskning is the property of Sykepleien Forskning and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Norwegian Journal of Clinical Nursing / Sykepleien Forskning is the property of Sykepleien Forskning and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: Norway, like other welfare states, seeks to leverage data to transform its pressured public healthcare system. While managers will be central to doing so, we lack knowledge about how specifically they would do so and what constraints and expectations they operate under. Public sources, like the Norwegian policy documents investigated here, provide important backdrops against which such managerial work emerges. This article therefore aims to analyze how key Norwegian policy documents construe data use in health management., Design/methodology/approach: We analyzed five notable policy documents using a "practice-oriented" framework, considering these as arenas for "organizing visions" (OVs) about managerial use of data in healthcare organizations. This framework considers documents as not just texts that comment on a topic but as discursive tools that formulate, negotiate and shape issues of national importance, such as expectations about data use in health management., Findings: The OVs we identify anticipate a bold future for health management, where data use is supported through interconnected information systems that provide relevant information on demand. These OVs are similar to discourse on "evidence-based management," but differ in important ways. Managers are consistently framed as key stakeholders that can benefit from using secondary data, but this requires better data integration across the health system. Despite forward-looking OVs, we find considerable ambiguity regarding the practical, social and epistemic dimensions of data use in health management. Our analysis calls for a reframing, by moving away from the hype of "data-driven" health management toward an empirically-oriented, "data-centric" approach that recognizes the situated and relational nature of managerial work on secondary data., Originality/value: By exploring OVs in the Norwegian health policy landscape, this study adds to our growing understanding of expectations towards healthcare managers' use of data. Given Norway's highly digitized health system, our analysis has relevance for health services in other countries., (© Emerald Publishing Limited.)

Background: Root cause analysis (RCA) is a systematic approach, typically involving several stages, used in healthcare to identify the underlying causes of a medical error or sentinel event. This study focuses on how members of a Norwegian RCA team experience aspects of an RCA process and whether it complies with the Norwegian RCA method., Method: Based on a sentinel event in which a child died unexpectedly during childbirth in a Norwegian hospital in 2021, the following research questions are addressed: 1. What was the RCA team's experience of the RCA process? 2. Was there compliance with the Norwegian RCA method in this case? A case study was chosen out of the desire to understand complex social phenomena and to allow in-depth focus on a case., Results: The result covered three main themes. The first theme related to the hospital's management system and aspects of the case that made it challenging to follow all recommendations in the Norwegian RCA guidelines. The second theme encompassed external and internal assessment. The RCA team was composed of members with methodological and medical expertise. However, the police's involvement in the case made it complex for the team to carry out the process. The third and final theme covered intrapersonal challenges RCA team members faced. Team members experienced various challenges during the RCA process, including being neutral, dealing with role-related challenges, grappling with ambivalence, and managing the additional time burden and resource constraints. As anticipated in the RCA guidelines, the team's ability to remain neutral was tested., Conclusion: The findings of this study can help stakeholders better comprehend how an inter-professional RCA teamwork intervention can affect a healthcare organization and enhance the teamwork experience of healthcare staff while facilitating improvements in work processes and patient safety. Additionally, these results can guide stakeholders in creating, executing, utilizing, and educating others about RCA processes., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Background: Active patients lie at the heart of integrated care. Although interventions to increase the participation of older patients in care planning are being implemented in several countries, there is a lack of knowledge about the interactions involved and how they are experienced by older patients with multimorbidity. We explore this issue in the context of care-planning meetings within Norwegian municipal health services., Methods: This qualitative study drew on direct observations of ten care-planning meetings and an interview with each patient right after the meeting. Following a stepwise-deductive induction approach, the analysis began inductively and then considered the interactions through the lens of game theory., Results: The care-planning interactions were influenced by uncertainty about the course of the disease and how to plan service delivery. In terms derived from game theory, the imaginary and unpredictable player 'Nature' generated uncertainty in the 'game' of care planning. The 'players' assessed this uncertainty differently, leading to three patterns of game. 1) In the 'game of chance', patients viewed future events as random and uncontrollable; they felt outmatched by the opponent Nature and became passive in their decision-making. 2) In the 'competitive game', participants positioned themselves on two opposing sides, one side perceiving Nature as a significant threat and the other assigning it little importance. The two sides negotiated about how to accommodate uncertainty, and the level of patient participation varied. 3) In the 'coordination game', all participants were aligned, either in viewing themselves as teammates against Nature or in ascribing little importance to it. The level of patient participation was high., Conclusions: In care planning meetings, the level of patient participation may partly be associated with how the various actors appraise and respond to uncertainty. Dialogue on uncertainty in care-planning interventions could help to increase patient participation.

Background: Interventions in which individual older patients with multi-morbidity participate in formulating goals for their own care are being implemented in several countries. Successful service delivery requires normative integration by which values and goals for the intervention are shared between actors at macro-, meso- and micro-levels of health services. However, health services are influenced by multiple and different institutional logics, which are belief systems guiding actors' cognitions and practices. This paper examines how distinct institutional logics materialize in justifications for patient participation within an intervention for patients with multi-morbidity, focusing on how variations in the institutional logics that prevail at different levels of health services affect vertical normative integration., Methods: This qualitative case study of normative integration spans three levels of Norwegian health services. The macro-level includes a white paper and a guideline which initiated the intervention. The meso-level includes strategy plans and intervention tools developed locally in four municipalities. Finally, the micro-level includes four focus group discussions among 24 health professionals and direct observations of ten care-planning meetings between health professionals and patients. The content analysis draws on seven institutional logics: professional, market, family, community, religious, state and corporate., Results: The particular institutional logics that justified patient participation varied between healthcare levels. Within the macro-level documents, seven logics justified patients' freedom of choice and individualization of service delivery. At meso-level, the operationalization of the intervention into tools for clinical practice was dominated by a state logic valuing equal services for all patients and a medical professional logic in which patient participation meant deciding how to maintain patients' physical abilities. At micro-level, these two logics were mixed with a corporate logic prioritizing cost-efficient service delivery., Conclusion: Normative integration is challenging to achieve. The number of institutional logics in play was reduced downwards through the three levels, and the goals behind the intervention shifted from individualization to standardization. The study broadens our understanding of the dynamic between institutional logics and of how multiple sets of norms co-exist and guide action. Knowledge of mechanisms by which normative justifications are put into practice is important to achieve normative integration of patient participation interventions.