Exploration of the sustainability of innovations in hospital care

This dissertation examines the sustainability of healthcare innovations following their active implementation in a hospital setting. Among other things, it evaluates the extent to which two surgical healthcare programmes that were successfully implemented in different Dutch hospitals are still part of the standard healthcare process years after the quality improvement project. It also presents factors that may influence the success of implementing sustainability. The insights in this dissertation are important for future quality improvement projects and research projects.

Two innovations – a short-stay programme for bowel surgery (ERAS) and a short-stay programme for breast cancer surgery (SSP) – were evaluated three to six years after their successful implementation. Both programmes appear to have been reasonably well maintained.

The respondents deemed the following aspects of relevance to the sustainability of the ERAS and SSP programmes: trust and faith in the innovation, application of the innovation in different contexts, the possibility to adapting the innovation to suit local needs, the possibility to modify the innovation, the institutionalisation of the innovation, and the short lines of communication within the multidisciplinary team.

Grant: ZonMw efficiency research