Human Competency as a Catalyzer of Innovation Within Health and Nursing Care Through a Perspective of Complex Adaptive Systems

Background

The institution where this research was conducted was a Japanese acute care hospital with one thousand beds. The hospital is located in the western part of mainland of Japan. The hospital currently employs four hundred physicians, thirteen hundred nurses, one hundred pharmacists and five hundred diverse co-medical practitioners. The context of this study was based on concerns that nursing managers may not be au fait in facilitating innovation; indeed, some had to effectively adapt to new technologies while others had not. Consequently, hospital management regarded that there was the possibility for improvement in the alignment of continuing education systems in developing competencies in order to effectively adopt technological innovations. Then, senior management requested the authors to research and identify areas of improvement in competency development, especially from the standpoint of innovation adoption on the part of nursing managers.

Healthcare systems in Japan are constructed on a foundation of social health insurance, which achieved universal population coverage in 1961. A closed system, in terms of employment, has been dominant; wherein health professionals are employed by health service organizations such as hospital. It should be noted that through the reimbursement system, the government has provided financial incentives to acute care hospitals when they begin intervention based on newly introduced innovation.