Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite and the Complexity Science Team in the Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science (CHRIS) within the Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI) have been leading work in the area of complexity science and have recently released a White Paper: Complexity Science in Healthcare – Aspirations, Approaches, Applications and Accomplishments. Comments are invited to Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite who can be contacted at jeffrey.braithwaite@mq.edu.au.

Download a copy of the white paper.

White paper objective

The complexity science approach to understanding, acting on, and researching health systems is becoming increasingly relevant to making change in health systems. This white paper aims to analyse complexity and its characteristics, and apply them to healthcare.

Our complex healthcare system

Health systems are there to care and cure, to prevent poor health, or promote and educate about good health. But they are troublesome. They cost lots of money to run; are distributed unevenly across countries and communities; are large, unwieldy and hard to coordinate; have many kinds of staff, types of technology and other moving parts; can provide very good and very poor services; and defy simplistic solutions.

The diverse and interconnected nature of this system leads us to conclude that healthcare is the example par excellence of a complex adaptive system (CAS). A number of new ideas and implications arise from this way of thinking, and are explored in detail in the white paper. These include the need to complement our linear approaches to healthcare system improvement with knowledge about complexity science; the ways in which system behaviour and outcomes, such as resilience and quality or poor care, emerge from interconnections among agents; the value of networks over formal organisational structures in ensuring knowledge dissemination, leadership and service performance; and the roles of uncertainty, nonlinearity and unpredictability in everyday clinical work.

Reader feedback

“A great educational resource about complexity science in healthcare” – Professor Kazue Nakajima, Osaka University Hospital, Japan.

“This will help us not only in teaching our students to think beyond their ... linear perspective but we can also use it in … our research on policy and regulation of healthcare” – Assistant Professor Annemiek Stoopendaal, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands.

“We, in Mexico, have been working on this very topic for several years now and it has been a fascinating journey so we appreciate very much what you are doing.” – Dr Enrique Ruelas, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Mexico.

“This is a fantastic resource.” – Associate Professor Bernice Redley, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.