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The evolution and everyday practice of collective patient involvement in Europe: an examination of policy processes, motivations, and implementations in four countries.

Haarmann, A. The evolution and everyday practice of collective patient involvement in Europe: an examination of policy processes, motivations, and implementations in four countries. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018. 366 p.
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Introduction
This study deals with the development of collective patient involvement in the Netherlands, England, Germany, and Sweden. Starting point for this study is on the one hand the theoretical classification of the Dutch and the English healthcare system as completely different regarding funding, organisation, and governance.
On the other hand, this is contrasted by the observation that both countries have legislated a virtually identical form of collective patient involvement at hospitals with identical competences. With discussions on the topic emerging at the same time, the question is, what factors contributed to this development or hampered it in other countries?

Theory and Methodology
As laws (not only) regarding patient involvement are passed in parliament, this is the arena in focus of this study. The aim of the theoretical part, then, is to some extent to guide the search for factors of influence. It is mainly comprised of two components: First, a variant of the ideational approaches in order to answer the question whether
or not the path hitherto pursued still gives satisfactory answers to the perceived problems and where new ideas stem from. The second component is the ‘actorcentred institutionalism’, which is employed in order to bring in institutional path dependency as well as actors’ preferences, interests, powers, and relations between them. Both parts can be understood to contribute to an ideal-typical sequentialmodel of policy processes.
The study has an exploratory, qualitative, and comparative case study design.
In order not to fall for any random factor that only appears to have influenced the policy process, two additional countries were sought that match the English and Dutch healthcare system well, namely, Sweden and Germany. Next to academicliterature, green and white papers, legal texts and regulations, expert interviews, and parliamentary minutes comprised the main sources. The categories found were based upon single codes, which were derived by selective and open coding.

Results
In summary, all four countries have developed their own particular ways of patient involvement, which do not converge. The countries can be categorised as having their focus on involvement at the provision level (England and the Netherlands) or at the policy level (Germany and Sweden). Each case has followed its highly individual path with mostly politicians as the main drivers for legislative changes. Their main motives range from more democratisation, through the adaptation of sickness funds to a system of marketised healthcare insurance, and more independence and accountability of hospitals to sticking to self-governance in social insurances as the main mode of involvement. The search for a new leitmotif for the governance of the healthcare sector can be discerned as the common
factor for the Netherlands and England. The analysis shows that more attention should be paid to different stances
among complex actors—such as political parties—and the actors’ perception as a potentially decisive factor in the political process. Eventually, a new model of the policy process can be derived. The analysis resulted in four abstract factors as the main distinguishing points within this process: (a) the framing of the problem at hand; (b) the constellation, context, relation, etc. in the political realm; (c) the relation and influence of other actors as well as; a (d)
the persistence of existing institutions. (aut. ref.)