Experiences of regionalization: assessing multiple stakeholder perspectives across time

This paper constructs a beginning frame for analyzing experiences of regionalizing in healthcare systems. Using Alberta as a case example, it traces the perspectives of multiple stakeholders (government, RHAs, frontline staff and public) on key organizational dimensions to describe the various experiences of organizing healthcare through regionalization. As a team of organizational and health researchers, we have been studying this case together and separately for 10 years. We present the framing and our case example to encourage future discussions, debates and consideration of this structural arrangement for healthcare that has swept across most of Canada. We believe that it is critical to learn more about both the pitfalls and potentials that regionalization produces across time and through change for the delivery of care and the protection and improvement of health. And we believe that perspective matters when assessing the full impacts of regionalizing and re-regionalizing and the multiple change processes embedded within these large structural reconfigurations.